Albeda College is an educational institute that serves 20,000 students across 35 sites around Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Renowned for quality vocational education, Albeda’s IT infrastructure must be as reliable and flawless as their teacher’s instruction.
According to Robert Roos, Albeda’s IT manager, “Albeda is committed to delivering business-driven IT services with superior stability and security. We needed a highly efficient, resilient and stable data center”
The IT team decided to bring its outsourced IT infrastructure in-house and move to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, a hyperconverged platform that consolidates storage, server, virtualization and networking resources and is very easy to manage.
Solution
When it became clear that the backup product Albeda had been using was too complex to maintain and consumed too many server and storage resources, they began looking for a new solution.
Roos said, “Data protection is extremely important for Albeda College. It safeguards our core assets and plays a key role in ensuring business continuity.”
After evaluating several products, Albeda chose HYCU for Nutanix.
HYCU is the only purpose-built backup and recovery software solution for Nutanix.
Not only does it preserve Nutanix simplicity with native integration and a hypervisor-agnostic architecture that includes AHV, you can learn it in less than four minutes, deploy in less than three, recover in two and begin backing up in one. Albeda uses HYCU with its Nutanix environment, which includes 20 nodes and about 116 virtual machines and supports a variety of infrastructure and business applications.
Simple and Easy to Use
“HYCU integrates seamlessly with the Nutanix platform. It was simple and fast to implement and very easy to use. HYCU’s attractive licensing and excellent 24x7 support made a great value,” Roos said.
Saved Money
In addition to its technical merits, HYCU also brought substantial financial benefits to Albeda College. By leveraging Microsoft Azure for backup storage, the college eliminated the need for on-site hardware dedicated to intermediate storage. This strategic move resulted in a remarkable reduction in hardware infrastructure costs, with initial savings amounting to €400,000.
This cost-saving aspect of HYCU aligns perfectly with the college's goal of maximizing the efficiency of its IT budget while maintaining high-quality services.
Cut Administrative Overhead
The implementation of HYCU led to a significant decrease in administrative workload for Albeda's IT team. Roos explained, "Because of HYCU's intuitive user interface, there was no steep learning curve or complex training needed. Sharing knowledge across our IT organization was easy. We save a lot of time on an ongoing basis as well. By eliminating storage hardware, we were able to cut the hours spent maintaining our backup environment by 50 percent. This frees our team for other important projects."
This reduction in administrative overhead allows the IT department to reallocate resources to other critical areas, enhancing overall operational efficiency and enabling the team to focus on innovative projects that can further improve the college's technological capabilities.
Accelerated Backups
The transition to HYCU resulted in a notable improvement in Albeda's backup processes. The college experienced a significant reduction in backup windows, thanks to HYCU's efficient real-time backup of virtual machines to the cloud. This enhancement more than doubled Albeda's backup speed, ensuring that data protection activities have minimal impact on the college's day-to-day operations.
The faster backup speeds not only improve data security but also contribute to the overall responsiveness and reliability of the IT infrastructure, supporting Albeda's commitment to providing high-quality educational services.
Boosted Reliability
Perhaps one of the most crucial benefits of implementing HYCU has been the increased reliability of Albeda's backup processes. Roos confidently stated, "Since introducing HYCU, our backup processes have run flawlessly."
This flawless operation provides Albeda College with peace of mind, knowing that their critical data and systems are consistently and reliably protected. In an educational environment where data integrity and availability are paramount, this level of reliability is invaluable.
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