Helping City University London’s students stay always-on  

City University London, a leading international university, has selected Veeam Availability Suite™ v8 under an extended deal. Veeam® Software, the innovative provider of solutions that deliver Availability for the Modern Data Center™, and its partner, Phoenix, will work with the university to help enable 24/7 access to data and applications for its 18,000 students, while driving down backup and recovery costs by more than 30%.

Increasingly, essential education materials such as learning resources, library files and assignment documents are digitised and stored centrally in university-owned repositories. With the introduction of student fees there has been increased pressure on higher education institutions to deliver better services to students. As part of this, City needs to ensure that it has a rapid and reliable mechanism for protecting and recovering student data, while providing real-time access to centralised services. The Enterprise Plus edition of Veeam’s Availability Suite provides City’s students with a secure on and off-campus access to their data. Vitally, it will also improve restoration functionality in the event of IT downtime.

Eric McIntosh, Deputy Chief Technology Officer of City University London said: “Education institutions are facing many constant and varying challenges. One of the most pertinent is that both students and staff are demanding a more effective IT infrastructure to meet their needs. City recognised that to ensure future success and user satisfaction, we needed to adapt our IT in order to meet the expectations of students and staff. Veeam’s Enterprise Plus solution addresses the fundamental needs of the competitive higher education sector, allowing us to be always-on and cost-effective. It also provides us with a scalable roadmap that ties into our longer term objectives.”

As part of the ongoing refresh and upgrade, City was considering several alternative solutions. The decision to upgrade its Veeam license from the Standard to Enterprise Plus offering was simple, as it provides unrivalled faster recovery times and point objectives (RTPO) of less than 15 minutes for applications and data. City will also benefit from the Enterprise Plus self-service feature, which enables the helpdesk to restore guest files, mailbox items and databases back to the main server with a single click through web user interface.

The three-year deal follows a competitive tender process and represents Veeam’s first public sector Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) in the UK. It also forms part of an established relationship with City, managed by Phoenix, to improve the quality of IT infrastructure and support services to its users. By bridging a gap between the requirements of the Always-On BusinessTM and IT’s ability to effectively deliver availability, Veeam Availability Suite will benefit students, staff and administrators on campus, while saving on operational and maintenance costs.

Olivier Robinne, Vice President EMEA of Veeam Software said: “It is no longer enough for higher education institutions to simply ‘have’ learning materials – however good they are – as they must be constantly available to students at anytime, anywhere. City University London recognised that. We collectively understood the challenges involved and were able to define a clear journey for the expansion of City’s IT infrastructure with a set of solutions that achieved their needs of being an Always-On Business, while improving the IT experience of its students. With this partnership, we are delivering critical application and data availability to the university’s diverse user community. From Veeam’s perspective, to achieve our first public sector ELA in the UK is a great achievement, and it is testament to a successful collaboration between our partner Phoenix and the team at City.”

Scott Auld, Higher Education Manager of Phoenix said: “Technology is changing the way students learn and, as a result, educational institutions are embracing the need to improve their IT services to meet both current demands and attract future students. With our collaborative partnership with Veeam, we provided a solution to enhance City’s IT infrastructure. The solution will enable constant availability of data and services, while improving IT efficiencies and operational costs, providing a much better staff and student experience.”