IT pros share disaster preparedness, VMware migration plans

Making a pitch for prep

Fariss said he was not comfortable with a misbehaving server just before the draft, especially at a time when analytics experts were becoming more involved.

"The reliance on that data was becoming much greater," Fariss said.

So Fariss contacted Dataprise, a managed services provider that runs a physical server with Veeam backup software on top of it. Dataprise created the replica server in less than 10 minutes. As a result, Fariss had a day or two to make sure it was working before the draft.

In the end, the Angels didn't need to use it, but they did have peace of mind.

The draft is just one of several critical time periods for a baseball team's different business units throughout the year. For sales, it's right after the season ends; for ticketing, it's every game.

Plan for the disaster now because you never know when it's going to strike.

"Disaster could strike at any time," said Steven New, senior director of business continuity and DR at Dataprise, noting the earthquake that struck San Francisco minutes before a World Series game in 1989. "Plan for the disaster now because you never know when it's going to strike."

One way to plan is through a disaster recovery test. For the Angels, that test included bringing all servers up into instant recovery, migrating the servers to production and then making sure users could access them and work in the event of a disaster.

The Angels had been using VMware Site Recovery Manager, but it was "pretty clunky," with a lot of moving parts, Fariss said. The team had a number of close calls before switching to Veeam, including a massive flood that narrowly missed the data center in Angel Stadium.

"That was the final straw," Fariss said. "'We are too lucky -- we needed to make this happen.'"

Veeam and Dataprise now protect 150 TB over 89 servers of varying criticality.

'We were toast'

The Marysville, Ohio, school district wasn't quite so lucky.

At the start of a weekend in October 2024, the school's football team wanted to watch a film but had trouble accessing the internet.

A short time later, "we found out we were toast," said Tom Powers, the district's technology director. The Marysville Exempted Village School District was the target of a BlackSuit ransomware attack.

"Besides a loved one dying, it was the worst feeling I ever had," Powers said. "I had tears in my eyes."

Powers said he felt responsible, asking himself, "What did we do wrong?" The district seemed to be in a good position with its security, backup and disaster preparedness strategy, which included Cisco Duo, firewall, Carbon Black, Veeam backup and on-premises immutable storage with Object First.

"Hackers are like bugs," Powers said. "How in the world did they get in my home?"

No matter what businesses use to keep hackers out, they're going to get in – in fact, they may be in already, Powers said. The question is, what can businesses do to protect their data and be in a position to recover?

In Powers' case, the immutable storage saved the district. He also turned to the district's disaster recovery plan.

Though the district had to cancel school for one day, it didn't have to pay any ransom and was able to fully restore the systems within just a few days. However, the data mining process continues.

VMware users plan exodus

The fallout from Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, including changes to products and licensing cost increases, was another recurring theme among users at VeeamON.

Rob Donaldson, IT manager at construction material company Vulcan Materials, said he faced a more than 250% renewal price increase for his VMware platform. Fortunately, the company had a perpetual license and didn't have to pay to keep it going, Donaldson said.

As a result, the company used Veeam to migrate more than 1,400 VMs to Microsoft Hyper-V.

Donaldson suggested making sure a company's hardware is in good shape before the migration process.

"Don't get halfway through and realize … now it's not working," Donaldson said.

Fariss, of the Angels, is considering a move off VMware.

"MLB is doing a bunch of evaluations of other platforms," Fariss said.

Nutanix is one of them. Fariss said he tried out the vendor a couple of times but didn't buy because of the limitation that they would have to use Nutanix's infrastructure and storage, which wouldn't work well with the Angels' SAN.

All the IT teams across Major League Baseball (MLB) are closely related but not tied together, Fariss said. The Angels buy a lot through MLB because of the league's buying power. For example, VMware licensing is done through MLB.

"We get better pricing through them," Fariss said. "Or, at least, we used to."

Paul Crocetti is an editorial director at Informa TechTarget. Since 2015, he has worked on the SearchStorage, SearchDataBackup and SearchDisasterRecovery sites.