Case Study: Northwestern University achieves faster daily VM backups and reduced backup storage with Veeam Backup & Replication

Northwestern University Enrolls Veeam for Data Protection and Virtualization Management

Northwestern University, a major educational institution with about 80% of its IT infrastructure virtualized and nearly 1,000 VMs running critical applications (Oracle, SQL Server, Exchange, Blackboard), faced slow, file‑based VM backups that routinely exceeded backup windows and made restores lengthy and manual—creating significant operational and disaster‑recovery risk.

Northwestern deployed Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE, leveraging features like file‑level recovery for Linux, vSphere changed block tracking, synthetic fulls, and built‑in deduplication/compression to move backups to disk with weekly tape copies. The result: every VM can be backed up daily, restore times dropped from days to hours, backup storage and tape use fell dramatically (from ~225 tapes/month to ~25 and about 48 TB of disk), and visibility, capacity planning and troubleshooting improved across the virtual environment.

Northwestern University

John Walsh

Manager, Processing and Information Services