Val Verde Unified School District Deploys Veeam Cloud Data Management

Veeam Software, Inc. announces the Val Verde Unified School District (USD) proactively increased its data protection with Veeam Availability Suite.

Val Verde USD worked with its existing network solutions advisor, Logicalis Group Ltd, to replace its slow, inefficient legacy backup to save hours and ensure data was available when it was needed, as well as protected in the event of a cybersecurity incident.

Based in Perris, CA, the school district serves 20,000 students in 23 schools and employs 1,800 teachers and staff. The school is responsible for ensuring that its student management system, Aeries, as well as the district’s critical business data is available and protected vs. any cybersecurity threats and other concerns. According to The State of K-12 Cybersecurity: 2018 in Review report, a school district is stuck by an incident on an average of every three days. No school district wants to become a victim of a cyber-attack, so Val Verde USD proactively sought to increase its data protection.

“Our team is committed to supporting the school district’s mission of creating life-long learners that are technology savvy as it will benefit their future career paths. As such, we must have applications and data available for use in classrooms at each school,” said Matt Penner, director of information and instructional technology, Val Verde USD. “However, our legacy backup was horrendously slow, taking an average of three hours for one file. Also, we were spending an hour or more each day, or about eight hours a week, just on management and maintenance. It was not an efficient use of time for our small IT team.“

“As part of our ongoing relationship with the district, we recognized that Val Verde USD’s existing backup solution was taxing on both their system and their staff,” said Cyndi Barrera, VP sales, Logicalis, a Platinum Veeam ProPartner and Gold Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) partner. “We focus on developing true partnerships with our customers across all verticals, and that enabled us to gain a strong understanding of Val Verde’s hurdles and their goals as well. As a result, we were able to identify the best solution for their needs: Veeam Availability Suite.“

With the assistance of Logicalis, Val Verde USD selected Veeam Availability Suite due to its direct integration with Nimble Storage from HPE, its support for tape storage and backup to the cloud. Now, the school district has increased its recovery speed by 98% from three hours to three minutes and backups 30TB of data across 100 vSphere VMs from Nimble Storage Snapshots on-premise for fast recovery. As an additional benefit, Veeam’s integration with HPE Nimble allows the IT team to test software updates before rolling them out in production.

“When our engineers want to test something in Active Directory, we build them isolated environments, giving them full range to completely destroy Active Directory if they need to because we know we can restore it fast with Veeam,” said Brian Falk, network services manager, Val Verde USD. “Veeam makes our lives easier. Whether through testing environments, its support for our tape backup or with its Cloud Data Management strategy. One of the things we like best about Veeam is it can protect all workloads – virtual, physical and cloud – from a single management console.“

The 2019 Veeam Cloud Data Management Report underscores the importance of a holistic approach to data across its lifecycle. The survey found that 69% of organizations have a gap in how fast applications and data can be recovered and underscored a critical need to have these recovered.

“Val Verde USD’s pro-activeness in protecting its data vs. downtime and outside threats shows its innovative nature in the market,” said Paul Strelzick, SVP of Americas, Veeam. “Veeam is helping Val Verde USD evolve the way it is managing data to ensure it is always protected and accessible on-premises, off-premises and in the cloud. As a result, the school district is able to focus on larger projects to further its mission of providing academic environments that produce life-long learners who become responsible citizens.“

Case study Val Verde USD Protects against Cyber-attacks with Veeam and HPE Nimble