Elgas is an energy company specializing in the sale and delivery of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). It is Australia’s largest supplier of LPG to homes and businesses, operates the largest LPG storage facility in Australia and has more than 40 service centres across the country.

THE CHALLENGE

Elgas has been quick to see the advantages that virtualization could offer its business. Jeremy Barton, software analyst and programmer at Elgas, explains: “We’re relatively experienced with using VMs so we were already well-versed in the benefits they have over physical servers.”  When the business decided to virtualize its Windows environment, Jeremy realized they needed to reconsider the business’s backup strategies as well. He says: “We had trialled and approved the use of Hyper-V
for virtualizing the majority of our Windows environment. In order to use the virtual machine infrastructure in a production environment, we needed to have a solid backup plan in place.”

THE SOLUTION

During their trials of the Hyper-V virtualization platform, the Elgas team designed a backup plan that would meet its immediate requirements and then searched the market for a solution that would help deliver this plan. One of the solutions Elgas considered was the VM Backup solution from Altaro. Altaro VM Backup is an easy-to-use, fast and reliable backup solution designed to take the hassle out of backing up Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines.
“Altaro provides a very comprehensive package and we realized that using Altaro would enable us to put in
place our backup plan at a very reasonable cost.”

THE BENEFITS

“The support team were quick to respond to the few queries we have during the installation process, and we
have found some features extremely useful. For instance, the offsite storage capabilities have proven to be a good
reason for selecting Altaro.”

The Altaro VM Backup solution enables users to replicate backups for disaster recovery protection, either to an offsite location, such as a remote office, via an Internet connection (with optimized transfer speeds through
WAN Acceleration) or by enabling drive swap rotation on selected drives.

“These full-featured and flexible backup options have benefitted Elgas.”

“The ‘seed to disk’ option has also proven to be quite useful when being applied over some of our slower links.”

“The Altaro solution is very comprehensive and has worked well for us.”