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AppAssure Software, a leading developer of innovative backup and disaster recovery software products for mission-critical Windows application servers, today announced that Sioux County, a county in the northwest corner of Iowa and a home to 33,704 residents, moved from Symantec Backup Exec to AppAssure’s Replay 4 backup and recovery software to overcome regular recovery failures, painfully slow restores, and no possibility of virtual backup. With Replay 4, Sioux County is reported to achieve 33% storage space savings and a 596% Return on Investment (ROI).
Micah Van Maanen, Sioux County’s Information Technology Director, and his team make sure IT infrastructure supports the integrated needs of Sioux County. “Anything that is on the network, we are responsible for,” explains Van Maanen. “This includes all the help desk needs, the website support, and all network issues. Increasingly, we were using Symantec’s Backup Exec and having hiccups in our backup routine, and Backup Exec restores were becoming painfully slow. We were devoting more and more time to something that should have just been routine.”
As Van Maanen explains, Sioux County looked at several different solutions, such as Veeam and vRanger Pro, but only AppAssure’s Replay, with its backup and disaster recovery solutions for government agencies, gave the county the ability to back up both virtual and physical servers, along with rapid restores at a price point that made sense for their needs.
According to Van Maanen, his team uses Replay’s advanced disk imaging ability to make sure all Sioux County’s data is securely protected. By setting the incremental backup snaps to every 15 minutes, Van Maanen’s team can perform lightning-quick restores. “With Replay, we now know we have a good backup. If something happens, we have current data and can restore to a physical or virtual machine,” says Van Maanen. “This has made Sioux County’s disaster recovery planning extremely easy as well. With virtualization, we’re not hardware-dependent, and with Replay, we have the ability to restore a complete server quickly because our virtual machines are backed up every 15 minutes. For example, if something were to happen, we’d still be able to run payroll the next day and get people paid on time.”
As Sioux County's IT Director says, he is impressed by storage space savings he is seeing. “Previously, our backup storage would be full after just two weeks of nightly backups,” he says. “Now we can fit ninety-six 15-minute snapshots, 48 hourly snapshots, 7 daily snapshots, 4 weekly snapshots, and one monthly snapshot for every server, and we are using only 33% of our disk space! I was shocked and really impressed with the data and the number of snaps we could fit.”
As for Sioux County’s Return on Investment with Replay, Van Maanen adds,“We actually didn’t do any ROI before we bought Replay because we had done the budgeting for this. But I am surprised with the savings, especially in terms of staff time savings. This frees us up to work on other projects, and means we have less time here in the evenings. Plus, Monday mornings are more pleasant as well!”
This year, Sioux County will be seeing a third machine up to handle virtual replication for even more comprehensive disaster recovery, says Van Maanen. “Backup and disaster recovery problems are no longer worries. Replay is saving us time, resources, and money,” sums up Van Maanen.
About Sioux County, IA
Located in the northwest corner of Iowa, Sioux County has a total area of 769 square miles and is home to 33,704 residents. Sioux County employs 150 people to administer the needs of the county.
About AppAssure Replay 4
Replay 4 is the world’s fastest and easiest backup and disaster recovery software for Windows application servers, VMware and Hyper-V Virtual Servers. The only complete “all-in-one” backup and recovery solution, Replay 4 enables local recoveries from any type of failure in just minutes, with the added assurance of offsite application and image backup and bare metal recovery from a total site disaster.
About AppAssure Software
AppAssure Software (appassure.com) is a leading provider of innovative backup and disaster recovery software for Windows application servers. AppAssure’s flagship product, Replay 4 is an application-aware, disk-based imaging solution that automatically and continuously snapshots entire Windows application servers delivering accelerated application backups and disaster recovery for in minutes.
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