World Vision’s humanitarian mission stays ‘always-on’ with Veeam

• Decreases restore time by 95% and downtime by 60%
• Global data centre in KL supports all locations and programmes worldwide

HUMANITARIAN organisation World Vision International is using Veeam Software products to reduce risk of data loss and improve availability, and has already decreased recovery time by 95% -- from 90 minutes to less than five minutes, according to the software company.
 
With more than 46,000 staff across 105 countries supporting 2,500 programmes, World Vision needs 24 x 7 x 365 access to virtualised applications and data that enable its humanitarian endeavours, Veeam Software said in a statement.
 
World Vision’s global data centre is located in Kuala Lumpur, providing support to all locations and programmes worldwide.
 
“We use IT to enable our organisation. IT supports our programmes and provides accountability for our work, such as building wells to deliver vital access to clean water,” Nick Goh, IT director of Global Infrastructure at World Vision.
 
World Vision now uses Veeam Backup and Replication for five terabytes (TB) of daily data on 500 VMs (virtual machines) residing on NetApp NFS data stores to HP StoreEasy Storage.
 
This allows for application-consistent backups from NetApp storage snapshots as often as needed, with little to no impact on production VMs, Veeam Software said in its statement.
 
Previously, World Vision used a legacy backup tool that was slow, unpredictable and limited staff members’ access, taking up to 24 hours to back up all VMs, the company claimed.
 
This made it difficult for the IT team to meet recovery time objectives (RTOs) and service-level agreements (SLAs) as a full restore would take up to 90 minutes.
 
“The legacy backup tool was traditional in nature, so it lacked recovery features that capitalised on virtualisation like granular recovery and automated recovery verification,” said Goh.
 
“We needed a faster, more stable solution that offered advanced recovery features and made efficient use of backup storage.
 
“We narrowed our choices to two solutions, but only one offered the performance and availability we needed,” he added.
 
With Veeam Software, World Vision consistently achieves high data availability, ensuring accountability to the people and communities served, as well as sponsors and donors, the company said.
 
“Overall, Veeam has reduced our downtime by 60%. High availability makes us a more efficient organisation, enabling us to have more children under our care, effectively track our programmes and provide accountability for our work,” said Goh.
 
The integration between Veeam and NetApp has shortened the backup window by 63%, allowing for 30% more backup storage space. It also creates application-consistent backups of 5TB of data daily.
 
World Vision also uses Veeam Explorer for Active Directory to recover objects that are accidentally deleted by users, and Instant VM Recovery as it quickly restarts a failed VM from a regular backup.

“What World Vision does is highly commendable but what is truly powerful is the scale at which it operates,” said Veeam Software’s vice president for Asia & Japan Julian Quinn.
 
“The [organisation] company deals with crucial and at times, sensitive information that requires stringent protection.
 
“Veeam will ensure we are providing World Vision with safe and verified data availability, ensuring recovery time and point objectives (RTPOs) of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data, staying true to the ‘always-on’ environment modern organisations operate in,” he added.
 
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