Restoring K-12 systems from an outage in just six hours

Spring Branch Independent School District (SBISD) in Houston, Texas, operates four high schools and three high school centers (grades 9–12), eight middle schools (6–8), and 24 elementary schools (K–5). In total, the district supports around 31,000 students from kindergarten upwards and employs more than 4,000 teaching and operational staff.

From childhood to graduation, SBISD offers innovative programs, engaging experiences, and pathways that empower students to discover their passions and unlock their potential. 

The district’s digital platforms are one of the key enablers of these outstanding student experiences, and SBISD aims to ensure that its administrative, collaboration, and learning management systems are available, reliable, and secure.

For many years, SBISD has relied on Veeam to provide data resilience for its physical and virtualized environments. As its existing disaster recovery storage systems approached end of life, the district looked for a new solution to help protect its vital data.

Troy Neal, Executive Director of Cybersecurity and Technology Operations, at SBISD, comments: “To give an example of scale, we store 6PB of video from over 4,400 security cameras in the district, and we retain it for 15 days. The storage system was at end of life cycle, and we didn’t want to get locked into the capital expense of renewing on-premises infrastructure. That search for a new solution led us to Everpure.”

With its backup storage environment up for renewal, SBISD decided to replace the legacy systems with modern Everpure FlashBlade//S and FlashArray//C solutions. Combined with an Evergreen//Forever™ subscription, the Everpure Platform provides continuous, nondisruptive software and hardware upgrades—delivering ever-modern storage.

“Implementing the new Everpure solutions was a simple 20-minute deployment,” remarks Neal. “That's the best part of Everpure: you set it up once and that’s it; you can pretty much forget about it. Setting up the networking probably took more time than figuring out the actual Everpure part!”

For SBISD, the simplicity of Everpure is a crucial advantage. Neal continues: “All the time we save means a better work-life balance for my team. That’s crucial, because recruiting and retaining talent in K-12 education is hard. Simple storage management means I can give my people time back for their families.”

To rationalize and streamline its data protection workflows, the district set up automated Veeam backups to the Everpure Platform. “We simply pointed Veeam at the new Everpure storage solutions and we were ready to go,” says Neal.

The true test arrived on July 19, 2024, when a global software outage hit.

“When I woke up and switched on the news, I saw that there was a major incident developing,” comments Neal. “By 6:30am, I was in the office running through the vendor’s recommended patching process with my team. We quickly realized that patching wasn’t going to work, so we turned to Veeam.”

At the time of the incident, SBISD was using both the Everpure Platform and its legacy storage as Veeam targets. “We have some really big ERP systems and databases, and our first restore from the legacy storage servers took more than 45 minutes,” explains Neal. “At that rate, it was going to take more than three days to get back up and running, and we could see our weekend vanishing.”

SBISD decided to see if using its backups on Everpure would provide a better result.

“The difference was incredible,” says Neal. “With Everpure and Veeam, we got our first server back up and running in minutes—and core systems were online before noon. Within six hours, we were fully restored—91% faster than if we’d not had our Everpure storage.”

Veeam backups on Everpure comprise approximately 80TB of data for around 50,000 users, incorporating some 100,000 devices, from cameras to laptops and servers to switches.

“We took a bad situation and used it for a live example and practice of our incident response plan,” says Neal. “The unexpected critical outage let us refine that plan while keeping disruption to a minimum. Almost nobody ever knew it had happened.”

Building on the outstanding performance and reliability of its FlashBlade® and FlashArray™ solutions, SBISD has decided to adopt Everpure as its preferred storage platform. The organization is preparing to replace its existing hyperconverged infrastructure with a three-tier architecture, underpinned by Evergreen//One™ storage as a service (STaaS).

“Evergreen//One is the perfect fit for our primary data center,” comments Neal. “With STaaS from Everpure, we get scalable, high-performance storage hardware without the added cost and complexity of hardware lifecycle management. Unlike our previous environment, there will be no need for downtime and disruption when we upgrade or scale out—with Everpure, everything just works.”

With Evergreen//One and Evergreen//Forever, SBISD is optimizing its operational and capital spend to deliver greater productivity within tight annual budgets.

“If you look at total cost of ownership from an engineering standpoint, you're saving 50% of your time not having to troubleshoot or maintain a product because Everpure does it for you,” says Neal. “My time and my engineers’ time is expensive, and the question is, How do we minimize it and be more efficient? When you look at the complete picture, total cost of ownership for Everpure is probably better by around 20% compared with other options.”

Neal concludes: “As the IT organization that supports thousands of K-12 students, our job is to make sure that digital systems are always available when our students and teachers need them. With Everpure and Veeam, we have the peace of mind that we can always restore rapidly if we need to.”