Success Story – VeePee
As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), Paris-based VeePee (Â www.veepee.com) is in the business of helping others work smarter. The company takes industry-leading technologies and resources, and proactively manages them to provide efficient and affordable services for its customers in the press and media industry. These businesses depend on VeePee to adopt best of breed solutions that are both cost effective and meet the always-on demands of their high performance environments.
As its customer portfolio grew and the volume of data they were managing multiplied, VeePee's backup requirements quickly exceeded the capabilities of its previous backup and recovery solution. VeePee turned to Zmanda for the ease of use, centralized administration, superior performance, and scalability of Amanda Enterprise and Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM). Zmanda provided VeePee the solutions they needed to confidently and securely protect their hosting architecture and groupware solutions and deliver on their service level agreements (SLAs).
VeePee manages a large volume of data stored in MySQL databases and finding a solution tailored specifically to MySQL environments was a key differentiator in their buying decision. Previously VeePee had to regularly export each database to a file in order to backup its contents, which was cumbersome and costly in terms of time and performance. ZRM has streamlined that process, providing hot backups of VeePee's MySQL databases and applications. VeePee also finds ZRM's point-in-time and 1-click restoration to be very intuitive and beneficial. ZRM's fast and scalable backups of large databases save VeePee considerable time and money compared to their previous MySQL backup method.
Another key differentiator for VeePee was the fact that Zmanda's solutions are open source. VeePee benefits from the innovation and robustness provided by a world-wide community of users and developers, and values the ability to write their own scripts to backup applications that are currently not supported out of the box.
VeePee uses Amanda Enterprise to store backup archives on iSCSI-based disk storage as well as an HP StorageWorks Tape Library. A wide variety of systems are backed up using Zmanda clients, including systems based on Windows 2008, Windows 2003, Ubuntu and Debian. Applications and databases being backed up by Zmanda agents include MS Exchange, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL and MySQL. VeePee finds the availability of a wide range of OS clients and database agents, and Zmanda's ability to quickly add new systems under the backup umbrella crucial for its ever expanding customer base.
From an economic standpoint, Zmanda's solutions were also very appealing. Not only were Amanda Enterprise and ZRM more affordable than other enterprise-grade solutions, but their fixed subscription based pricing models are also more attractive from an accounting perspective. Solutions that use volume based pricing are very difficult to manage for an MSP with multiple clients, each of whom has activity peaks and valleys. It can be a full time job just figuring out how much of the expense of the solution to pass along to each client. Zmanda's solutions have clear and predictable pricing that can easily be divided up and passed along to VeePee's clients.
"In the hosting business, customers have very high expectations for service and uptime and if you don't deliver on those contracts, they will take their business elsewhere," said Antoine Coetsier, IT and innovations manager at VeePee. "Therefore, Zmanda's industry-wide reputation for providing solid products with superior service was a key factor in VeePee's buying decision. They have provided reliable data protection solutions that give us the security and peace of mind to deliver on our service contracts confidently."