City University London selects 'always-on' Veeam to improve IT services

City University looks to improving IT services for students while slashing costs by one-third

City University London has partnered with Veeam Software in an effort to provide constant availability of data and services, while also improving IT efficiencies and reducing costs.

Under the terms of the three-year deal - the financial details of which haven't been revealed - the university will use Veeam Availability Suite v8 data centre service, along with Veeam's backup, restore and replication capabilities.

The City University agreement with Veeam comes after the software company partnered with Scania to improve the truck manufacturer's backup and recovery platform.

Veeam, which describes itself as providing solutions that "deliver availability for the modern data centre", will provide City University with 24-by-seven access to data, services and applications for its 18,000 students.

City University is also looking to reduce the cost of IT by more than 30 per cent as it looks to provide fee-paying students with more cost-efficient services suitable for the digital demands of today's students.

"Education institutions are facing many constant and varying challenges. One of the most pertinent is that both students and staff are demanding a more effective IT infrastructure to meet their needs," said Eric McIntosh, deputy chief technology officer at City University London.

"City recognised that to ensure future success and user satisfaction, we needed to adapt our IT in order to meet the expectations of students and staff," he continued, before going onto describe why the institution selected Veeam.

"Veeam's Enterprise Plus solution addresses the fundamental needs of the competitive higher-education sector, allowing us to be always-on and cost-effective. It also provides us with a scalable roadmap that ties into our longer term objectives," he said.

By using Veeam's "always-on" platform, the university says the deal will "benefit students, staff and administrators on campus, while saving on operational and maintenance costs".

Olivier Robinne, vice president EMEA of Veeam Software, welcomed the partnership with City University.

"It is no longer enough for higher education institutions to simply ‘have' learning materials - however good they are - as they must be constantly available to students at anytime, anywhere. City University recognised that," he said.

"With this partnership, we are delivering critical application and data availability to the university's diverse user community," Robinne added.

The three-year deal between City University and Veeam represents Veeam's first public sector enterprise licence agreement (ELA) in the UK.

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