Ultra Energy overhauls "notoriously unreliable" backup system

Global engineering company Ultra Energy, acquired by Curtiss-Wright this week for $200 million, overhauled its legacy backup system in 2022 after experiencing frequent backup failures.

The specialists in providing solutions for the nuclear industry exist in a highly regulated environment and require constant availability of mission-critical systems.

According to head of IT Paul Sylvester, “We have data that has government classification on it. So, if it's in the UK it's restricted or official sensitive and in the US its ITAR based data. So, with that, that data has to be retained forever.”

Sylvester told Digital Nation at the VeeamON conference in Florida this week that the organisation moved from using mechanical tape libraries to a file-based system with Veeam.

“I used to be a bit of a Veeam evangelist when I was a reseller, so firstly I said to the business “what are you using for backup?” and funnily enough, they were using Veeam which was great, but they were using it in the wrong way,” Sylvester said.

According to Sylvester, the tape library system that the organisation was previously using was known for being “notoriously unreliable”.

“Although the newer ones are better and have higher capacity, the one that they had at the time was pretty problematic. So, if you had a problem, Veeam would attempt to fix that or try again or try another tape. It would do three attempts and then fail the job. So that's what they were consistently seeing,” he said.

According to Anthony Spiteri, regional CTO APJ at Veeam, while disk-based backup is quicker and, in some cases cheaper, tape technologies have come a long way and still have a role to play.

“Tape gets a bad rap because people still think of it as it was 10, 15, 20 years ago, tape’s been around since the 60s and 50s. So, negatives to tape, it's slow and not a lot of data being stored. But now tape technologies have come in leaps and bounds,” Spiteri said.

“Tape is absolutely air gapped and that’s a big thing… as opposed to disk where it's still connected to the network in some way – there’s still a slight element of risk that something could go wrong with that.”

Ultra Energy moved to the file-based backup system with Veeam after considering several other vendors in the market.

“My experience with Veeam over the years as a consultant was that it was the least problematic backup solution that I had used and caused me the least amount of problems in my service desk,” Sylvester said.

“Especially if you pick an infrastructure that Veeam partners with, it means that the system works hand in hand and Veeam can basically utilise the hardware as a strong basis for doing quicker backups.”

The results from the implementation have seen Ultra Energy fast-track its incremental backups from 13 hours to 4 hours, allowing the organisation to introduce a maintenance window.

The switch from tape-based to file-based backups has also seen recovery time of a 200 gig server reduce from four hours in the tape system to just 25 minutes and full weekend backups have quickened from two days to just 13 hours, he said.

“We basically provided the stakeholders with what they wanted and some, so we exceeded their expectations in terms of the solution.” Sylvester said.

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