Business Challenge

Virtual infrastructure at Ferentino municipality consists of 60 VMware VMs. The VMs are running all the municipal IT systems and applications, such as the Registry Office system, revenue management system, e-Government services, online services for citizens and enterprises. Moreover, VMs are storing all citizens’ and employees’ personal data and all the data necessary to execute municipal services.

“Previously, we used an old version of a popular VM backup solution. We did not update the software because support renewal costs were too high for our budget. And because of that we had frequent problems and could not get the assistance of technical support,” says Daniele Capoccetta, IT Manager of Ferentino Municipality.

At the same time, Italian regulations require all Public Bodies to deliver a report on the adopted disaster recovery policy to the Agency for Digital Italy. This policy must cover all the technology and organizational solutions available to restore data, systems, and infrastructures in case of a disaster. Comune di Ferentino needed a solution to protect municipal data against failure, in order to comply with the latest regulations and improve efficiency and reliability of their IT environment.

“Our old solution didn’t fit our requirements, so we decided to implement a new one to overcome this challenge,” says Daniele. “In fact an internal business impact analysis we made, suggested us to resolve this challenge ASAP because, if we didn’t, it would have a negative impact on our citizens caused by disruptions and IT inefficiency”.

The new solution would have to meet a number of requirements, such as efficient, simple, and fast VMware VM backup, full VM and file-level restore, and a web-based “single pane of glass” to easily manage backup operations. “Since regulations require us to adopt technologies that improve services provided by the Public Body, it is really essential to have IT systems and applications which deliver outstanding reliability and data availability,” says Daniele.

Solution

A local solution provider company – Bagnetti Sistemi – advised Danielle to try NAKIVO Backup & Replication. “We have evaluated several products available on the market and found that NAKIVO Backup & Replication simply has the right balance of features, pricing, and usability for both us and our clients,” says Daniele. “Support was also very responsive when we reported an issue during deployment. We were very satisfied with the assistance provided.”

NAKIVO Backup & Replication can be installed on Windows, Linux, or directly on a Synology or Western Digital NAS. Additionally, the product can be deployed as a preconfigured Virtual Appliance, which Daniele selected for his environment as it does not require preparing a special VM, and does not need a Microsoft Windows license.

After a smooth deployment, Daniele was impressed with the simple and intuitive Web interface of NAKIVO Backup & Replication, which enabled him to create VM backup jobs within minutes. “We really liked the opportunity to manage our backups via a web console,” he says. “It’s very easy to set up jobs and backup retention policies.”

NAKIVO Backup & Replication was specially developed to protect virtual environments and provides a rich feature set, including forever incremental jobs, support for applications and databases, screenshot verification for backups and replicas, global data deduplication, and network acceleration.

The recovery capabilities of NAKIVO Backup & Replication proved to be the greatest value to Daniele. The Flash VM Boot feature provides the ability to instantly recover VMs directly from compressed and deduplicated VM backups. “With Flash VM Boot and a small backup server we can recover the most important VMs within seconds. This is amazing!” he says. NAKIVO Backup & Replication also provides the ability to instantly recover Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory objects, as well as files of Windows-based and Linux-based VMs.

Results

NAKIVO Backup & Replication has enabled the Ferentino municipality to automate the VM backup process, improve reliability and uptime of their applications, and speed up data recovery. “We perform a very fast backup of all the virtual environment, so disruptions due to latency don’t occur,” says Danielle. Using the Flash VM Boot feature, Danielle can now recover from a disaster by instantly recovering most critical VMs directly from compressed and deduplicated backups. “NAKIVO provides us with outstanding reliability and ensures short recovery time and recovery point objectives,” he adds.

“We have saved 50% of the budget available for the backup operations. Also, we can afford NAKIVO’s maintenance, so we can keep the software up to date and have access to their great technical support if we happen to need it. NAKIVO contributed to solving the problems of our IT infrastructure, allowing the Municipality of Ferentino to win the challenge,” says Danielle.

Company Profile

Comune di Ferentino is a municipality in Italy, in the province of Frosinone, Lazio, which is 65 km southeast of Rome. The municipality spreads over an area of 80 km2 and has a population of over 21,000 residents. Ferentino is also a town in the province of Frosinone. Perched on a hill overlooking the valley of the river Sacco, it lays in a strategic location between the Rome-Naples A1 Motorway and main provincial roads.

Italian communes are the basic administration entities in Italy: each commune belongs to a province, while each province belongs to a region. A commune provides many of the basic civil functions to their citizens, including registry of births and deaths, registry of deeds, and contracting for local roads and public works. Historical resonances of communes often reach back many hundreds of years or even a full millennium. For more information, visit www.comune.ferentino.fr.it.