Case Study: Alberta Union of Provincial Employees achieves 15-minute backups and restores with HPE SimpliVity

HPE SimpliVity systems rescue Alberta Union from disaster recovery fear

The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE), a trade union in Edmonton with 175 staff serving about 85,000–90,000 members, needed a reliable, scalable solution for storage consolidation, tier‑1 backups and disaster recovery after a severe winter flood threatened its main data center. The small six‑person IT team found traditional SANs wouldn’t meet requirements for fast recovery, off‑site replication, remote office management or predictable growth, and backups routinely took up to 24 hours.

AUPE deployed HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged systems at its primary site and a remote DR site in Calgary, gaining inline deduplication, simplified management and fast provisioning. Backups and restores dropped from 24 hours to about 15 minutes, RTOs now meet 15‑minute targets, hardware needs fell by roughly 40%, deduplication reached about 26:1, and IT staff now spend far less time on maintenance while application performance and disaster recovery capabilities have significantly improved.

Alberta Union of Provincial Employees

Michael Moskaluk

Director of IT & services