City Says Goodbye to Veeam, Reduces Backup Times by 700%

As the fifth-largest municipality in Ontario and 10th-largest in Canada, the City of Hamilton was facing backup and recovery challenges as it supported a city population of more than 500K.

It was difficult to achieve backups in a reasonable window and the city wanted to simplify its overly complex environment and resolve issues with frequent backup failures. The city had deployed Veeam for backup across its infrastructure, but because of poor throughput, dedupe and compression, the city easily hit maximum storage capacity on a frequent basis.

Hamilton needed to make some decisions about how to resolve issues of inefficiency and rising cost. The city knew it needed a new backup and recovery solution, even after only having deployed Veeam several years ago. The city looked for a backup and recovery solution to provide:

• Simplified ease-of-management
• Global deduplication and compression capabilities
• Ability to meet SLAs and reduce backup and recovery times
• Native cloud integration with the ability to easily move data to the cloud and back on-premises

Hamilton deployed Cohesity in each of its data centers, and set up its infrastructure similar to a VMware stretch cluster, allowing the city to leverage Cohesity between its two sites, and move data natively without running in VMware across both data centers.

The City of Hamilton also implemented Cohesity Helios to manage the cluster and automated infrastructure, and the ability to monitor backup data change rates to detect possible ransomware attacks. Cohesity is delivered through a validated HPE solution with HPE DL360 servers, allowing the city to consolidate backup data and apps on-premises and to the cloud.

With Cohesity, Hamilton is now set for future scalability and benefits from:

• Significant cost savings from licensing and staff efficiencies
• Over 50% reduction in total disk space thanks to 10:1 dedupe ratios and superior throughput
• Backup times for incremental backups reduced by 700%.
• Flexible, hybrid solution for seamless integration on-premises and to public cloud

“Not only do we now have a modern backup and recovery solution that works, Cohesity is also able to extend to native integration for cloud, file and objects, security, and dev/test. We deployed Cohesity Helios to manage our multi-cluster environment, giving us global management and ransomware protection from edge to cloud from a single, unified platform.”

– Jonathan Mancini, Supervisor, Datacenter Operations