Notre Dame needed a cost-effective and reliable virtual machine (VM) backup and recovery solution for storing, managing, and searching its fast growing library of student and staff data.

Virtualization gives organizations a convenient way to maximize the returns on their hardware investment. With programs like VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, they can host multiple applications and operating systems on a single physical server, allowing them to access more of their computing and storage capacity.

However, organizations with multiple virtual machines (VMs) require sophisticated server backup solutions to back up and recover data, especially when stored across separate servers. Often, these enterprise-level solutions are too expensive or technically demanding for smaller organizations.

Notre Dame implemented VM Explorer in 2014 and now uses the software to perform regular full backups of all of its data, as well as more frequent incremental backups. The school backs up to local storage capacity within its HPE DL380 servers, as well as to a legacy central network-attached storage (NAS) device.

Using the Scheduler function, Colpus is able to run the full backups outside school hours or on weekends. “We considered several products but VM Explorer was, by far, the best in terms of functionality and price,” says Colpus.

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