Case Studies

Empowering the proactive approach Ailstock has used HPE solutions throughout his career at Maryland Auto Insurance. Built into the architecture of HPE SimpliVity, Ailstock and his team ran backups locally and, until recently, used HPE Cloud Volumes for long-term retention of tertiary backups. With HPE SimpliVity, Ailstock could run local backups, retain them for two weeks on-premises, and obtain off-site backups from tape if needed. However, retrieving backups from tape required a costly, multistep process that took time away from an always-busy IT team. "It would take a person on my team a whole day to go to tape," says Ailstock. "Depending on the time of day, if you declared an emergency, you had to pay extra to get the tape back within four hours or whatever the SLA was." For a small team, this was time stolen from the department's business focus, for which Ailstock sets a high standard for success. "We are always forward-looking, consistent with our response levels," he says. "We meet our SLAs 98% of the time and have a responsive time of less than two hours for help desk tickets." With HPE Cloud Volumes Backup sunsetting, Ailstock had the opportunity to look at new ways to simplify the protection of on-premises virtual machines. A seamless transition to simplified protection As a busy IT manager, Ailstock welcomed the hands-on trial experience of HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery, a software as a service (SaaS) built to protect workloads across the hybrid cloud. Working with Ailstock, the HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery technical ramp team and onboarding teams were absolutely useful in seamlessly migrating away from HPE Cloud Volumes Backup, he says, and fantastic at onboarding for anything needed throughout implementation without taking time away from Ailstock's day-to-day activities. "As HPE Cloud Volumes Backup was sunsetting, the HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery team was able to extend storage beyond the shutdown period, making sure my data was safe until I approved to transition to the HPE GreenLake platform," he says. Thirty days into the 90-day evaluation, Ailstock was confident the solution fit his goals for increasing backup and recovery efficiencies while reducing the overall cost of backing up and protecting VM data. With the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, anyone on Ailstock's team can back up and restore HPE SimpliVity workloads from one dashboard, with the control and insight to retain VM copies for whichever duration is required. Files are restored in minutes, and full VMs, which used to take up to a full day, are recovered in a few hours or less. "Restoring data with HPE GreenLake for Backup and Recovery is easy. I go in, I see the VMs and data I need to restore, I hit 'go', and it starts. There aren't 55 steps in between. It's infinitely faster," says Ailstock. "The availability and safety of data is up exponentially with the HPE GreenLake platform," he says. "Our end users are blissfully unaware as to what it takes to recover data. Before the HPE GreenLake platform, it wasn't uncommon for them to hear, 'Well, it's going to take a day or longer, depending on where the tape is.' Now, it's not the same problem as it used to be." The availability and safety of data is up exponentially with HPE GreenLake." – Matt Ailstock, IT Systems Manager, Maryland Auto Insurance

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