Element Four recently wrapped up a large project for the Birmingham Water Works Board—a metropolitan water service utility that serves 600,000 people in five counties of Alabama. It is the largest water system in the state and one of the largest in the nation.
Following a rigorous bid process, Birmingham Water Works Board (BWWB) announced that they would be partnering with Element Four to implement a Veeam backup solution that would better protect their organization from a data loss scenario. The Water Works Board has 65TB of source data spread across hundreds of virtual servers—a sizable amount of data that is crucial to running their day to day business operations.
Every day, thousands of Birmingham citizens access BWWB’s systems to open accounts, make payments and check the status of their water service. These citizens trust BWWB with keeping the personal and private information they share during transactions safe and secure. It was crucial for the Water Works Board to have a plan in place, so that, in the event of a data loss scenario—they would experience minimal disruption in their service.
The agent-based backup product that BWWB had been utilizing for their backups was unable to meet their expected RPO, which lead to some production systems only being backed up once a week. To address these problems, BWWB decided that their best course of action was to implement a Veeam cloud backup solution that provides for reliable, scalable, and cost-effective backups at their location and offsite backups to the Microsoft Azure Cloud.
As with most public works organizations, the Element Four team had to work within a strict budget. Element Four was able to assist BWWB and avoid a large capital expenditure by providing one monthly price for the BaaS which included a Cisco UCS appliance and Veeam licensing. The result was a monthly operating expense that came in 40% lower than other proposed solutions.
Now, BWWB is able to back up their entire production environment multiple times a day allowing them to meet their defined recovery point objectives. BWWB’s end users also have an improved experience when making transactions because the performance of BWWB’s VMs are no longer affected by a legacy backup operation.
To learn more about the BWWB project, download a PDF of the case study below:
