McGrath’s cloud migration demands new backup strategy

McGrath Estate Agents has undergone a dramatic digital transformation in the last 2 years, migrating 99 percent of on-premises data and an aging infrastructure footprint of physical file servers in almost every branch, to Microsoft 365 and Azure.

Previously using Commvault for its physical file server backup, the shift to cloud required a rethink of the organisation's backup strategy, especially given the spread of McGrath branches across rural and regional Australia.

Darren Warner, head of technology at McGrath Estate Agents told Digital Nation at the VeeamON conference in Florida this week, Commvault "had been transformed to backup to disk and to cloud, but it was across the network.

"So, if there was a file server in Mudgee, it would copy it into a Sydney data centre and then another copy out to the Commvault cloud. It failed a lot of the time and someone would have to sit there looking at it day in, day out.”

Given that every single physical server in McGrath’s now 136 branches “went in the bin” the organisation no longer required local backup and instead moved to Veeam Data Cloud, then known as Cirrus.

“I don't have to factor in infrastructure, I don't have to patch. Storage is the biggest thing. When you're growing like that, it's very hard to plan for storage growth,” Warner said.

“And probably most importantly, predictable cost model. We're already paying per user per month for 365 – If you just tack a backup onto that as per user per month, it's a perfect model.

"It's really easy to plan so that you know if I'm going to bring on 100 users next month, I know exactly what that's going to cost.”

Another key point of difference in the products is complexity. According to Warner the implementation of Veeam Data Cloud was “up and running in under 10 minutes”.

“Veeam Data Cloud is so simple. All of my service desk team have access to Veeam Data Cloud and they can all restore.

"I've never given one of them a training course ever…I said, ‘Here's access to a console. Come and see me if you can't figure it out.’ No one has ever come to see me,” Warner said.

“Whereas Commvault is a far more complex product. I've used Commvault a few times. It's not intuitive. You need quite a degree of training. And that's just training in terms of setup, ongoing maintenance restorations.

"Not to say it's not powerful, but you almost need someone who's very dedicated to the product. Whereas I now have zero dedicated people that look after backup.”

Anthony Spiteri, Veeam’s regional CTO APJ, told Digital Nation that a critical need for McGrath was a simple solution that could be deployed by a smaller operations team.

“[Warner] doesn't have a big backup operations team. So that means from a day-2 operations point of view, if he doesn't have to deploy services, servers, visual storage, if he can just get it first party through us from the Veeam Data Cloud, that's a huge weight off his shoulders operationally,” Spiteri said.

Despite its reliance on Veeam, McGrath still has some Oracle Cloud workloads where Veeam tools fall short.

“We're continuously just reviewing what we can bring together into a single platform. That's the dream for everything just to bring it all together,” Warner said.

Note: Velvet-Belle Templeman travelled to Fort Lauderdale, Florida as a guest of Veeam to report on the VeeamON conference.