Improving performance and efficiency at Evalueserve

Evalueserve reduces recovery time and proactively resolves issues in a virtualised environment thanks to the Veeam Availability Suite

By Sean Dudley on 28 December 2016

Improving performance and efficiency at Evalueserve

This article first appeared in the Autumn 2016 issue of The Record.

Evalueserve uses proprietary tools, techniques and domain expertise to solve complex business challenges for clients at Fortune 500 companies, professional services firms and mid-size companies in various industries.

The company provides financial services, corporate and professional services and business solutions for life sciences and healthcare, analytics, intellectual property and research and development.

Each business unit has service level agreements (SLAs) with many of its clients, and Evalueserve’s IT department plays an important role in meeting each SLA.

“We’ve always met clients’ SLAs, but we knew there had to be a faster and easier way to recover virtualised data and applications,” says Anuj Joshi, associate vice president of IT at Evalueserve.

Evalueserve’s traditional backup tool required agents in each virtual machine (VM). This slowed down backup and replication to the point that only the most critical VMs, and not all VMs, could be backed up and replicated daily.

“The traditional backup tool didn’t provide deep visibility into our VMware vSphere environment,” says Joshi. “Without deep visibility, we couldn’t see relationships among our resources so we didn’t have all the information we needed to diagnose problems.”

Joshi and his colleagues attended a VMware seminar and watched a demonstration of Veeam Availability Suite, before which they were told Veeam provided full visibility into virtualised environments and restored VMs in minutes.

Joshi says: “We realised that if we gained full visibility and recovered critical applications fast, such as Microsoft SQL Server, Active Directory and SharePoint, we would be able to meet clients’ SLAs with tremendous efficiency, giving us more time to work on data centre initiatives that improve business process efficiency.”

Veeam Availability Suite proved its value to Evalueserve when the IT team restored a test VM in minutes from a regular backup, and reduced recovery time by 99%. Veeam also provides full visibility into the virtualised environment, enabling fast identification and resolution of issues before they impact business.

Evalueserve’s goal is now to deploy Veeam Availability Suite in offices worldwide for the onsite backup of approximately 5TB of data on 250 VMs and offsite replication for disaster recovery.

“Veeam gives us an extremely high level of confidence in our IT infrastructure,” says Joshi. “In case of disaster, we have full confidence we can restore quickly. Instead of our system administrators spending four to six hours restoring VMs and several hours each week worrying about backups completing successfully, they use that time to focus on IT initiatives that will improve business processes.”

Evalueserve is now able to back up all VMs each day, and staff can test the recoverability of each backup with SureBackup. Veeam Availability Suite also provides visibility into Evalueserve’s VMware vSphere environment through monitoring, reporting and capacity planning.