CVS Case Study
Veterinary group slash data management overheads
Veterinary group slash data management overheads
Overseeing backup now takes minutes rather than most of a day
Easy protection for unstructured data from new acquisitions
CVS Group is Britain’s largest provider of veterinary services for small companion animals (eg cats, dogs and guinea pigs), horses and livestock. With more than 500 practices, 1,500 vets and in excess of 2,000 nurses, the group also includes diagnostic laboratories, pet crematoria and an e-commerce division. Last year CVS totalled an annual revenue of £327.3m.
Managing and protecting a large organisation’s data can be challenging - particularly when the business is growing annually at the rate of 20%.
Andy Jay, Infrastructure Engineer at the CVS Group, required a data management solution that was reliable, scalable and flexible, while ease of deployment was also a major consideration.
He said: “When we acquire a new site, we need to ensure we have live data from them.
“It’s important that we double check that we’ve got their data and have good access to it.
"That data may be managed by another support company, but we own it, so we have to make sure we have a copy of it. When we need a quick online backup, we will use Redstor because we know that it will work and make the problem go away for now.”
Deployed and configured in 15 minutes, Redstor’s agent-based, lightweight, efficient client enables CVS to back up a wide range of environments quickly.
With easy installation and no hardware costs, the CVS Group can scale up or down as demand changes.
Redstor currently protects 35TB. That is over practice level, where they are running the PMS system on their servers, as well as laptops, some in-house servers and some external servers. We have some hosted servers in the cloud that we use Redstor for as well - and, of course, acquisitions.
“I visited a new site today, looked at their servers and it was a case of ‘What’s going on? They’ve got no backup at all’. I had Redstor on my memory stick and just installed it and got it sorted.”"
Andy Jay, Infrastructure Engineer at the CVS Group
Challenges
- Major difficulties in ensuring backups were completed successfully
- Overseeing backup was taking a dedicated member of staff the best part of a day
- Delays in obtaining copies of data from new acquisitions
- Group had grown to such a size that it was no longer possible to view entire date estate using existing data management solution
Solution
- Backups that require minimal or no human intervention throughout daily management
- Intelligent, policy-driven automation and sophisticated reporting
- Flexible, fast protection of complex environments - with backups ready to run instantly or in line with automated schedules
Key benefits
- IT team manage by exception and easily evidence compliance
- Management of backup reduced from almost a full-time job to minutes every day
- Protect any new acquisition’s entire infrastructure in a matter of minutes
- Manage and protect large data sets, wherever they may be, via a single control centre.
Huge savings in management overheads
With intelligent, policy-driven automation and sophisticated reporting, Redstor is enabling the CVS Group’s IT team to manage by exception and easily evidence compliance.
Andy said: “When we were using our former provider, we had a member of staff on the service desk checking backups every day - and hardly anyone looking after our staff on IT support issues.
“There were often problems with backups and the onus was on the service desk to ring whoever it concerned and say ‘Have you plugged the drive in? Have you put the USB stick in?’. It got very laborious.
“The service desk was wasting their day. Instead of dealing with genuine support calls, problem tickets, we were chasing staff members to ask ‘have you changed this? have you changed that?’ and a lot of staff we were contacting were not interested. They were vets and nurses who would say ‘No, I’m not dealing with that right now. I am dealing with a sick dog’.
“It got to the point where it was ridiculous.
"It was costing the company so much money in manpower to chase it - and it remained unreliable because people were still failing to do backups. They’d say ‘we did it yesterday’ but in reality we’d find yesterday’s tape was not plugged in.
“We realised we needed a centrally managed backup solution - one that was easy to see from a console so you could say ‘right, that has gone wrong, or this has gone wrong’ - and know that we do not need to interact with a staff member in any way.
What is the main role that the cloud is playing in your backup and recovery strategy?
- Archive/long-term retention
- Store files short term
- Host disaster recovery as a service and business continuity
- Back up PCs and other end-user devices
- Run applications protected with cloud-based backup and recovery
“We can just jump on a server remotely and deal with a problem ourselves - unless we needed to restore a server or something like that. We could look at it and say ‘that is not a problem’.”
Redstor unifies backup, instant data recovery and access, archiving, search and data migration, through a secure, central console.
The CVS IT team now have borderless visibility of the organisation’s entire, complex data estate at any time, on any device.
Since we’ve had Redstor, we have cut down on so much time by not having to call individual sites.
There are no tapes to change, no tapes to index, or USB drives. The data just gets protected.”
Andy Jay, Infrastructure Engineer at the CVS Group
A dedicated member of the CVS IT team would spend the best part of every day just calling sites to make sure backups were in progress.
Andy said: “A first-line helpdesk guy always had to chase staff before he could put a tape in to run a backup.
“With Redstor, even filling in a spreadsheet to record what has backed up and what hasn’t has been made easier.
“We will get a report and invariably any issue will turn out to be something like an internet failure rather than a problem with Redstor.”
Whether the data of a new business is stored onsite, in the cloud or in a hybrid environment, Redstor offers CVS immediate access to automated, encrypted and secure online backup and recovery.
The main reason we got Redstor in, was to deal with the servers for the practices because it is client data that we needed to protect quickly. The time to back them up now is minimal.It’s so much easier to do. We just see the ticks on a report and if anything is not backed up, it gets highlighted and then we’ll investigate it.
"Redstor has saved us a considerable amount of time. Now if anyone logs a ticket, someone will sort it and the next day everyone can now carry on at work just fine.”
Andy Jay, Infrastructure Engineer at the CVS Group
As a former IT support technician for Norfolk County Council, where he used Redstor to protect schools’ data, Andy had no hesitation in coming up with a recommendation when CVS began considering which data management provider would best suit their needs.
Redstor has 40,000 customers worldwide and Andy said: “I knew the product and I said I wanted to put it forward as a good option.
Being a corporate environment, we were required to look at three others, including some really big players, which we felt were just trying to fleece us.
"They were saying ‘you can have this, this and this’ but we didn’t need many of the features they were offering. We just wanted the data protected and to get it back quickly.
"Redstor clearly has some great functionality too and represented a good deal."
Andy Jay, Infrastructure Engineer at the CVS Group
Speed of restores ensures business continuity
The CVS service desk are tasked with doing a restore test on every site every one or two months to ensure everything can be recovered speedily in the event of an issue.
Andy explained “Several are full-blown restores, especially anything that is a virtual environment.”
Business continuity and speed of recoveries is tested using InstantData, Redstor’s unique technology, that streams business critical data for immediate access from any location.
While the rest of an organisation’s data is restored behind the scenes, users can start accessing the files that they need immediately.
Andy said: “For a practice level, we are backing up a SQL database and user data. The main thing we need to get back is a SQL database so they can be trading again if their server ever dies - and we have had to do restores as a result of hardware failure.
“Sometimes a third-party support company needs a copy of SQL and we’ll say ‘that’s fine. We’ve got a backup copy in the cloud. We’ll send it down to you’. Job done.
“We have always had an internal local hard drive. So, there is always that option but the first option we use to recover data is Redstor.
“You just select the file and press restore. Some of the guys don’t expect it to be that simple. They think it’s more complicated than it actually is. Once they’ve seen it a few times, they realise they can do it themselves very easily.
“Sometimes time is a critical factor, but on other occasions the staff may not need data until the start of the following week - the point is, with InstantData, I know I can get it for them as quickly as they want.”
What is the longest time users have been kept waiting before being able to start working again after a data loss or outage?
- Less than an hour
- 1-4 hours
- 5-12 hours
- 13-24 hours
- Two days
- I don’t know
Single, secure, web-based control centre
Redstor's web-based control centre gives Andy and his colleagues a centralised view, wherever they are in the UK.
He is able to provision, monitor, maintain and report on backup and recovery through a single control centre, using any device.This allows him to create schedules, adjust retention policies and configure bandwidth usage.
He said: “With our former provider, we’d got to the point where we had too many sites for the console to handle because it was not designed to run that many - so you would go down to 70 sites and it would not load any more and it would crash the server that was running it.
“Redstor does not restrict us. I can get through to it from anywhere.
"Having a web console is good because when I’m out and about, and I may not have my laptop or want to get it out, I can quickly log on using my phone or an iPad. That is handy if I just want to see what’s going on.
“But I don’t look at it every day. We’ve installed it, we’ve configured it. If there’s a problem, it gets highlighted and then it gets sorted. It’s not a case of ignoring it, it’s just that I know that it does its job.
“For a business like ours where we support an entire company, I would definitely recommend Redstor because you can rely on it to work.
"It is a hands-off experience. Deploy, set up, leave. That kind of thing. For sanity do your recovery tests to know it’s running, but you will see that it is by the tick boxes in the console.
“It is really about the ease of how it works. We are very happy with it.”
