Falkirk Council is the 11th largest unitary authority in Scotland, responsible for delivering local council services to a growing population of more than 157,640 people, or more than 80,000 households, in the Falkirk area.

THE CHALLENGE:

The Falkirk Council IT services team provides systems and support for many different operations and services, including education. In an increasingly virtualised environment, the council realised that it needed the ability to undertake a virtual ‘bare metal’ restore for its high school Hyper-V clusters, in order to minimise downtime and reduce the myriad of issues that would crop up in trying to restore a series of virtual machines from a traditional backup process.

However, the Council’s existing backup solution simply wasn’t up to the job, as Senior Support Engineer Kenny Lang explains: “The existing backup product we had in place only supported standard/traditional ‘file and folder’ backups, and we were facing a hefty upgrade cost to add in the extra components to give us some extra functionality to undertake full backups of the VMs on each cluster.”

THE SOLUTION:

The Falkirk Council team soon realized that Altaro VM Backup offered the functionality it needed without the hefty price tag. “After undertaking some R&D, we downloaded the trial version of Altaro and were surprised at how easy and quick it was to deploy. Further to this, it matched our requirements of being cost effective and able to undertake full virtual bare-metal restores alongside granular file and folder restores. The additional functions of sandbox test restores, and the ability to run VMs directly from an offsite location were also additional bonuses that greatly enhanced our backup and disaster recovery options.” Kenny continues: “To be honest, when we downloaded and tested the product and then looked at the cost we knew Altaro was what we needed! We found that a number of established backup vendors offered up some add-ons to their existing products to introduce Altaro style functionality, but the costs were steep and beyond the constrained budgets we operate under. The ease and speed of Altaro made it an obvious choice for us.”

THE BENEFITS:

The immediate cost benefits of the Altaro solution may have been compelling for the Falkirk Council team but, since installation, Altaro VM Backup is already delivering tangible technology and performance benefits for the council. “Being able to restore entire VMs easily is a big step forward from the backup processes we’ve used in the past. For advanced setups like our SharePoint services, trying to restore from a traditional backup was a time consuming and complex process, with a reasonably high degree of risk.

With Altaro, we are able to restore a SharePoint VM in its original working state.” The Altaro solution was recently put to the test when a fault with an iSCSI array on one high school deployment had started to corrupt some of the disk partitions. The vendor’s proposed solution wasn’t viable and would have resulted in lost data, but the Altaro solution came to the rescue. “Altaro solution enabled us to complete the repair job easily, reliably and without risk – and with time to spare! This was the acid test for us, and Altaro passed it. We’ve been very impressed with Altaro in action.”