Established in 2008, JSC Insoft develops business applications, portals, and IT solutions for government organizations in Lithuania, such as the Police department, Tax Inspectorate, Ministry of Transportation, Ministry of Internal Affairs and many others. The company offers a range of services in regards to custom software creation, including development, testing, design, implementation, and support.
While JSC Insoft has developed many sophisticated IT systems and portals for government organizations and enterprises, those systems have warranty and post-warranty support agreements, which bring the need to have many development and testing environments, which are organized as VM groups, hosted in-house. Such support agreements often mandate strict requirements regarding backup and recovery.
“We were searching for a VM backup solution, which would offer the possibility to have shorter backup windows, as well as longer backup retention periods while using less backup space. One of the obvious solutions would be a deduplication appliance, but with our VMware VMs exceeding tens of TBs, this would involve additional investment into backup hardware. Our goal was to find a reliable VM backup solution that would provide availability of data and applications 24/7,” says Pavel Paidem, IT Solutions Manager at JSC Insoft.
Bakotech, a value-added distributor, recommended NAKIVO Backup & Replication as a possible VM backup solution for Insoft, because of the product’s integration with Synology NAS, as well as its global data deduplication feature. “Alternative VM backup solutions that we have evaluated, relied either on external deduplication or on a “per job” deduplication for saving VM storage space. The problem with increasing VM storage space was rather pressing that is why we were pleasantly surprised how quickly NAKIVO Backup & Replication reduced our VM storage space and removed duplicate copies of data,” says Pavel. The global data deduplication feature provides considerable reduction in storage space capacity, while also allows for a more efficient disk space utilization and lower direct storage costs.
Instead of investing in a deduplication appliance, Insoft decided to take advantage of NAKIVO Backup & Replication integration with Synology NAS. By installing NAKIVO Backup & Replication on Synology NAS, Insoft improved VM backup performance, saved storage space and budget. “Basically, we have created our own VM backup appliance by installing the product on a Synology NAS. This integration not only reduced costs, but also provided a faster and more flexible way to deploy and manage the product. NAKIVO Backup & Replication uses all the available space on the Synology NAS to store VM backups and deduplicates the backed-up data across the entire storage, to save even more space. Not only were we able to significantly decrease our VM backup budget, but also, we saved money on hardware and other infrastructure resources,” says Pavel.
“In terms of VM backup, forever incremental backup without the need for periodic full or synthetic full backup, made our backup windows short and consistent. Such performance eventually led to our development and testing infrastructure to function 24/7,” says Pavel. In addition, Insoft enjoys the ease of use and clarity of scheduling VM backup and backup copy jobs. “The overview of the existing backup retention policy is easily understandable, allowing us to rotate recovery points on a per-needed basis. While backup copy provides the simple and powerful way to create and maintain copies of backups in different locations,” says Pavel.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication, installed on Synology NAS, provides JSC Insoft with an excellent VM backup performance and a reduced VM backup budget of 75%. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the company has reduced VM backup storage space with global data deduplication, and now can schedule and maintain backup copies in different locations. “Instead of going with traditional backup vendors or investing in a deduplication appliance, we are happy that we found NAKIVO Backup & Replication. The accumulated savings come from the price of software itself, storage hardware price, and the absence of the need to purchase a backup server,” says Pavel.
Established in 2008, Insoft is an advanced, dynamic, and devoted IT solution provider in Baltics and the United Kingdom. Right from the beginning, Insoft has been developing and continuously improving its products and services thanks to the creative and professional people who are devoted to delivering the highest quality. Insoft solutions are widely used in E-Government Services, Police and Security Services, Border Control, and Criminal Justice Agencies. Insoft has successfully deployed E-Government software and services to the Local and Central Government. The company uses robust technology to create tailored tools for business process and information management and its IT professionals are always client-focused and analyze business requirements thoroughly to deliver top solutions. For more information, please visit www.insoft.lt.
Founded in 1967, Charlotte Radiology is one of the largest and most progressive radiology groups in the US. In addition to offering 24/7 coverage for 14 hospitals, Charlotte Radiology also owns and operates 13 breast centers, 3 mobile mammography units, 3 vein centers, a cosmetic center, and several vascular and interventional clinics.
With 19 different locations, Charlotte’s Radiology IT infrastructure is primarily virtualized and consists of 10 ESXi hosts. “VMware VMs store standard file servers, application servers, Microsoft SQL and Exchange, and the Radiology Information System. The Radiology Information System is the main application that drives our patient centers because without this application we cannot provide proper services to our patients, as it contains medical records, insurance, and personal information. It is crucial for the continuity of our business to have the Radiology Information System available 24/7,” says Tony Maynard, Manager of Information Technology at Charlotte Radiology.
Previously, Charlotte Radiology relied on a different VM backup solution for data protection, but the software was complicated and could not keep up with the changing requirements of the group. “The previous VM backup solution supported our needs at first, but at the same time was not intuitive because it required several steps and processes to get to know how the product operates. Due to the product’s complexity, it came to the point that only two people in our department were able to perform backups and restores. In addition, we were limited by the amount of the capacity that we were able to back up. Moreover, scheduling multiple backup jobs at once was fairly painful. The biggest issue was that we paid for 100% of the product, but could only back up 80% of the capacity,” says Tony.
While searching for a replacement, Tony was looking for an easy-to-use VM backup solution that would have no capacity limitations and was able to integrate well with a cloud. “We wanted a more streamlined solution, where anybody in our department could schedule backup jobs without any problems. Furthermore, we wanted a solution that would support all the newest VMware releases and have a professional support in place. Basically, NAKIVO Backup & Replication provided all of that, so after 30 days of trial and evaluation, we decided to purchase the product,” says Tony.
“NAKIVO Backup & Replication not only met our initial requirements, but we were pleasantly surprised that we needed no training sessions to use the product. I really enjoy the fact that once we installed NAKIVO Backup & Replication on Synology NAS, we just log into the interface and start the work,” says Tony.
Charlotte Radiology selected the Synology NAS installation because it unifies all VM data protection components in one box, without the need to maintain additional hardware. “With Synology NAS, there is no need to add a 3rd party software to get it synchronized to the cloud, no Windows overhead, no worries about patching with the latest Microsoft update, no worrying about the hard drive going bad in RAID 5. NAKIVO Backup & Replication on Synology NAS provides a super intuitive interface, additional storage space, and easy integration with Amazon cloud,” says Tony.
“With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we perform VM backups six days a week and backup our file servers every three hours. The scheduling process is really intuitive because you have different options and you do not have to try to figure it out and note it all down. Backup jobs take roughly minutes to complete and there are no limitations on the amount of backup jobs to schedule at one time,” says Tony.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed on Synology NAS provided increased VM backup speed and provided storage space savings for Charlotte Radiology. “In terms of speed, Synology NAS boosts the performance nearly 2X. With the previous VM backup solution, we were backing up roughly 13TB of data every night and with NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we now backup only 5TB because of data deduplication and compression, so this is huge savings in terms of space and performance,” says Tony.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed on Synology NAS, provides Charlotte Radiology with a 2X VM backup speed increase and VM storage space saving of nearly 50%. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the group can now backup an unlimited amount of data and copy VM backups to the cloud. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides us with ultimate speed, performance, and granularity, and eliminates the need to purchase any add-ons for cloud integration. Previously, we were licensed to a certain amount we could back up, but now NAKIVO Backup & Replication removed that barrier and allows us to back up everything in the entire organization. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we have confidence in our backup infrastructure,” says Tony.
Having served Charlotte for 50 years, Charlotte Radiology is a radiology group practice that specializes in imaging, with sub-specialized radiologists. Charlotte Radiology specializes in Diagnostic Radiology, Vascular and Interventional Radiology, Neuroradiology, Pediatric Radiology, Musculoskeletal Radiology, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine, Nuclear Radiology, and General Practice. The group employs more than 90 radiologists with diverse and specialty training in everything from Mammography to Musculoskeletal and Pediatrics to Interventional Radiology. The group’s mission is to provide quality-driven, innovative, customer-focused services that exceed expectations. For more information, please visit www.charlotteradiology.com.
A well-known large networking company, headquartered in the United States, needed to achieve 24/7 availability and reduce VM backup storage space. Their IT infrastructure consists of three main data centers, a corporate office, and several remote offices. Each main datacenter runs eight VMware ESXi hosts, while the corporate office has four VMware ESXi hosts. The networking company knew their main goal was to achieve 24/7 availability of critical IT systems within the data centers, so that if the data and applications are not available, there is still a way to restore VMware VMs quickly and efficiently. The company could not contemplate having critical IT systems offline, because many customers would be adversely affected.
“Since we are a networking company, we have a majority of infrastructure-based things, including VPN devices, websites, corporate financial data, file and email servers, while also hosting a variety of applications for our customers… Previously, we were not able to perform full and incremental VM backups because our homegrown system with asynchronous replication and snapshots allowed us to only backup the files inside the VMs and that limited our data protection obligations. We had to start looking for a VM backup solution that would match our requirements in cost, performance, and simplicity, as well as guarantee 24/7 availability of ours and our customers’ data and IT systems,” says Doug C., Senior Network Engineer.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a fast, reliable, and affordable VM backup solution for VMware, Hyper-V, and AWS EC2 environments. NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers advanced features that increase VM backup performance, improve reliability, speed up recovery, and help reduce the networking company’s TCO. TrueNAS is an enterprise-ready storage appliance developed by iXsystems that guarantees data integrity and has complete redundancy throughout the storage array. TrueNAS is based on the world’s number one Open Source storage solution, FreeNAS, and provided the networking company with the performance and capacity they needed right out of the box.
The switch to NAKIVO Backup & Replication made sense to the networking company since the product provided not only reliability, simplicity, and cost savings, but also because NAKIVO Backup & Replication can be installed on Linux which was a strong selling point. Since the organization wanted to keep both Rsync backups and NAKIVO Backup & Replication backups, storage space became a pressing issue. The networking company decided to craft their own high-performance VM backup solution by using NAKIVO Backup & Replication on FreeNAS servers and TrueNAS storage appliances from iXsystems.
“We have established a multi-tier data protection strategy that works well for us. VMware VMs running on top of VSAN handle the first level of failures, while replica VMs that are stored on the TrueNAS are a second tier of protection in case something would happen to VSAN. In addition, we perform full VM backup with NAKIVO Backup & Replication running on top of the TrueNAS appliances and FreeNAS servers. Lastly, we use backup copy jobs to send backups offsite,” says Doug.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides the networking company with the ability to simultaneously run backup jobs in different datacenters, and backup all of the VM servers at once. This makes the entire data protection process significantly easier to manage. Using the VM replication feature, the organization can easily power on the VM replicas for near-instant disaster recovery. With NAKIVO’s backup copy, the company can easily maintain copies of its backups between datacenters for an extra layer of protection.
“NAKIVO Backup & Replication and TrueNAS work well together. NAKIVO Backup & Replication has native support for NFS mounts and we can also make an NFS mount on the TrueNAS and get things working pretty fast. Both products are straightforward, operate cohesively with each other, and produce high VM backup performance results,” says Doug.
The primary goal for using NAKIVO Backup & Replication with TrueNAS appliances and FreeNAS servers was to achieve 24/7 availability by securing enough storage space on the dedicated hardware for VM backup and VM replication. NAKIVO Backup & Replication integrates well with TrueNAS and FreeNAS servers which results in higher VM backup performance. On average, the networking company is seeing an average reduction of 85% in storage space use with NAKIVO Backup & Replication bundled with TrueNAS and FreeNAS servers.
“We use both compression and deduplication on TrueNAS and the storage space savings are usually pretty high; on average, we see an 85% reduction in storage space,” says Doug.
Using NAKIVO Backup & Replication, with TrueNAS, delivers results for the networking company by providing 24/7 availability of data and critical IT systems, as well as providing a VM backup storage space savings of 85%. With both TrueNAS and NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the organization can now easily use VM backup, VM replication, and backup copy features that fit well with the networking company’s goal of TrueNAS Multi-Tier data storage protection. The networking company utilizes a TrueNAS system at all three of their main data centers to hold replica VMs, while the FreeNAS certified servers are used as backup boxes.
“We are really happy that TrueNAS and FreeNAS servers operate so well with NAKIVO Backup & Replication and how they complement each other with a great price/performance ratio. With the help of NAKIVO Backup & Replication, and iXsystems, we now have onsite backups, offsite backups, and VM replicas. Both TrueNAS and NAKIVO Backup & Replication are valuable components to our successful daily operations,” says Doug.
iXsystems is a pioneer in building innovative storage solutions and enterprise servers for a global marketplace based on open technology. With decades of expertise, many contributions to Open Source communities, and stewardship of leading Open Source projects, iXsystems has become the leader of innovative storage and server solutions for the global open technology market. Thousands have come to rely on iXsystems’ approach to doing business. Headquartered in Silicon Valley since its founding in 1996, its consultative approach and dedication to customer service, support, and technological contributions has never wavered and builds the foundation for a new era powered by open technology. For more information, visit www.ixsystems.com.
Virtual infrastructure at Innovabee GmbH consists of 2 datacenters with approximately 200 VMware VMs in a combination of Windows/Linux infrastructure. “Our mission critical VMs contain about 40TB of data,” says Markus Kugler, IT Manager at Innovabee GmbH. “Our datacenters are completely virtualized with a wide range of business and IT services operating on VMware, including Microsoft Exchange 2013, Microsoft Sharepoint, SAP Database Servers, SAP Application Servicers, Fileservers, and SQL-Servers.”
All Innovabee services require constant and reliable data protection. Since the company no longer has any physical servers, everything is processed in a virtualized environment, therefore, it is absolutely necessary to protect all 200 VMware VMs. Moreover, it is important for Markus to perform fast daily backups and instantly recover application data from two years ago. “We run daily backups of all our VMs. Very important data, like special databases, are even backed up to tape.”
The ideal solution, according to Markus, should not only offer reliable and strong performance, but also be able to handle heavy load in the least amount of time. However, the previous VM backup solution used by Innovabee failed to meet these requirements. “Our previous solution was very slow and could not handle the load of VMs to process. We were not satisfied with the reliability and speed of the solution. A full backup of our datacenter took hours to complete,” says Markus.
“As all of our infrastructure is completely virtualized, constantly backing up data is a key success element for our business. However, we were spending more than 18 hours to fully backup just one of our datacenters. We even enabled data deduplication, but that did not help to improve the speed or performance of the solution. We needed a more effective and affordable VM backup solution that could not only perform fast and frequent VM backups that does not take hours, but also offers near-instant recovery of data and applications,” says Markus.
The disadvantages of the previous VM backup solution led Markus to investigate other solutions available on the market. Fast and reliable VM backups with a rich feature set were his priorities. Moreover, the next solution would have to be more affordable as well as minimize costs while delivering improved functionality and performance.
After looking for available VM backup products, Markus came across NAKIVO Backup & Replication. Taken back with its simplicity, ease of implementation, and impressive performance, Markus was pleased. “What impressed me was the stunning performance and ease of use on one side, and the price on the other side,” he says. “A test drive of NAKIVO showed convincing proof of its superior performance.”
“While testing NAKIVO, we noticed considerable improvement in speed and performance and that was due to data deduplication, efficient data compression, and network acceleration. With deduplication, the product truly reduced the amount of storage space needed to save VM backups, while not only reducing storage capacity requirements, but also boosting the speed of VM backups. With network acceleration, we noticed considerable reduction in network traffic, that also boosted the average speeds of VM backups,” said Markus. “Moreover, we were able to recover entire VMs from backups in a matter of seconds. Flash VM Boot is an exciting feature that enabled near-instant recovery, without recovering entire VMs first,” said Markus.
In addition, a big advantage for Innovabee was the ability to deploy NAKIVO on Synology NAS Rackstation RS3614xs+. “The new direct NAS installation feature allowed us to install NAKIVO directly onto a Synology NAS, in an easy and simple manner, while also freeing up virtualized infrastructure resources for other business needs,” says Markus.
Installing NAKIVO directly on Synology NAS, not only improved VM backup performance, but also improved manageability with the combination of hardware, software, storage, and data deduplication in a single system. NAKIVO on Synology NAS can backup VMs at up to 1 GB/s, fully utilizing the available NAS bandwidth. Overall, storage space is saved, backups are faster, and bandwidth is fully utilized.
Overall, after a long testing period, NAKIVO Backup & Replication met Markus’s requirements and exceeded his expectations: “It is absolutely useful that NAKIVO runs natively on Synology NAS. The file recovery option is also useful for fileservers. The Flash VM Boot allows me to run a VM from backup without restoring it first,” says Markus. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication came out on top with the highest VM backup performance, job reliability, and lower overall cost. Our datacenters are now protected and VM backups are performed much faster than with our previous solution.”
NAKIVO Backup & Replication is now used to protect the VMware infrastructure at Innovabee GmbH and has immediately demonstrated results in reliability, usability, and performance. “We have now a very reliable backup solution. With NAKIVO screenshot verification, the daily health-check of VM backups can now complete in less than 5 minutes,” says Markus.
“The possibility to create a high-performance VM backup appliance with Synology NAS, has tremendously improved backup performance. With NAKIVO on Synology NAS, VM backups now complete within about 1.5 hours instead of 18 hours, a 12X improvement. We achieve near-instant recovery of data and application with Flash VM Boot, and reduce storage space with data deduplication and compression. Lastly, we were able to save costs not only on the backup solution, but also on reducing storage space and the IT administration time,” says Markus.
Innovabee GmbH is a consultancy and system house with more than 25 years of experience in the SME sector that is located in Waiblingen, Hamburg, and Munich. As an SAP Gold Partner, the company provides affordable and powerful SAP solutions to small businesses. Innovabee GmbH offers a variety of solutions for ERP, finance, business intelligence, business process management, web business, and enterprise mobility. The company provides solutions for food and beverage, cosmetics, chemical, consumer goods, and wholesale industries. In cooperation with international partner network, Innovabee GmbH implements solutions for multiple customers around the world. For more information, visit innovabee.de.
The Oxford Partnership (TOP) brings together three exceptional education and training providers in Activate Learning Oxford, GEMS Education Solutions, and Moulton College. In addition, this powerful partnership has established four women’s colleges in the North of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – namely, Al Jouf Sakaka, Arar and Al Qurayyat, and Al-Madinah. Each college has over 2,000 full time students. The partnership sets high standards that are aimed to help students succeed, right from the start of applying to one of the colleges and to the last day of the program.
The IT infrastructure at The Oxford Partnership (TOP) is comprised of four sites that are located across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and each site has a local IT provision for both students and teachers. “Each site has a VMware vSphere cluster with two to three ESXi hosts and an iSCSI SAN. Each site is connected using MPLS to allow collaboration and sharing of data,” says Rizwan Majeed, Head of IT Infrastructure at The Oxford Partnership.
Each site at TOP follows a standard configuration model, providing the following services to the local users: directory services, file services, print services, as well as System Center Configuration Manager for machine configuration and package deployment. “In addition to all the regular services, we also have a Microsoft SQL solution that is used for student’s records and attendance tracking,” says Rizwan.
There is a great need to ensure 24/7 data availability across all four sites, in order to support teaching and learning, that is why TOP takes data protection matters seriously. “VM backup and recovery are extremely important to our organization because thousands of students rely on our IT infrastructure for learning and safe keeping of data and files. We experience challenging conditions, especially in the remote territories, where power is less stable, so having a stable VM backup and recovery solution is of the utmost importance,” says Rizwan.
The previous method of data protection at TOP was basically non-existent. “Previously, our students just relied on USB drives to store their data, and it was only a matter of time before a catastrophic loss would have happened. Our strategic IT partner, Cutter Group, has encouraged us to virtualize our infrastructure within each college, to allow students and staff to roam between locations if necessary. A key requirement was to ensure that a robust VM backup solution was in place. In our search for a backup solution, it was crucial that we could leverage capabilities of the VMware infrastructure for the image-based backups, while allowing for instant VM and file recovery, and system wide deduplication,” says Rizwan.
Cutter Group, TOP’s strategic IT partner, recommended NAKIVO Backup & Replication as a possible VM backup solution to TOP, because of the product’s perfect combination of features and price point. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed as a pre-configured virtual appliance is an excellent deployment method for our smaller sites, allowing for consistent and high performance deployments. This method of deployment is a huge time saver because we simply import and configure NAKIVO Backup & Replication within a few hours of hitting the ground. In addition, not having to install a console or an application to integrate with the product, allows multiple administrators to have a view of the system,” says Rizwan.
“In terms of VM backup, our backup jobs finish within a few hours each evening and we have scheduled screenshot verification and space reclaim during the weekends. Each college has its own backup schedule that allows for parallel processing in a scale out model. We save a significant amount of time in managing and controlling backup jobs, as each new VM deployed within the VMware infrastructure is already incorporated into NAKIVO Backup & Replication,” says Rizwan.
With the help of the global data deduplication feature, TOP saw significant storage space savings. “We particularly like the global data deduplication feature, which allows us to make huge disk space savings. We are seeing storage space reduction of 75% within each NAKIVO Backup & Replication deployment. This is excellent as it allows us to increase the number of our retention points without sacrificing much more space,” says Rizwan.
TOP has also been able to improve VM recovery. “We have extensively tested the Instant VM recovery feature. Waiting for full VM restores across a LAN is still an extremely slow process, when users are demanding access to the systems. In our tests, Instant VM recovery was able to reduce this window and deliver the restored services to users much faster. We have been fortunate to not need to recover the entire VMs in the production and only used this feature for disaster recovery testing and we are able to see impressive performance from NAKIVO Backup & Replication,” says Rizwan.
“In terms of future projects, we are looking forward to take advantage of the backup copy feature. We are currently working on utilizing this feature to take edge site data back to the main site for further protection and improved recoverability. With backup copy, we will be able to store backup copies onsite or offsite, as well as have a separate schedule and recovery point retention policy,” says Rizwan.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication allows TOP to instantly recover full VMs and save approximately 75% on storage space with global data deduplication. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides a simple, yet powerful VM backup solution that is fully equipped to solve various backup and recovery challenges. Convincing users to store their data in a centralized way was a cultural shift to what they were used to with a previous data protection method. Once convinced, we observed a huge increase on data demands and NAKIVO Backup & Replication easily scaled to meet this requirement. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, time and convenience benefits are significant. We can now confidently restore and support our users with their ever increasing data demands,” says Rizwan.
The Oxford Partnership (TOP) is comprised of three organizations that are recognized internationally for excellence. The Oxford Partnership brings together Activate Learning, GEMS Education Solutions, and Moulton College. The partnership is passionate about education and the power of learning, and combines expertise in learning approaches with international education experience and excellence in industry-specific vocational routes. Activate Learning is judged to be good with outstanding areas by Ofsted (Jan 14). GEMS Education Solutions’ already manages education institutions in the UK and has increased trainee attendance and outcomes. Moulton College is rated as outstanding by Ofsted and supports over 7,000 trainees a year. High quality teaching, learning, and assessment are at the heart of The Oxford Partnership. Attracting the best and most talented staff is crucial to success in providing excellent teaching, learning, and assessment for all our students.
Established in 2005, Cutter Group is one of the world’s leading suppliers of virtualized computing solutions. Cutter’s objective is to deliver cutting edge expertise in providing sustainable and cost-effective solutions and services. Headquartered in the UK, with subsidiaries in the Netherlands and Cyprus, the Group’s reach is far and wide. Cutter Group has a wide-ranging experience across multiple sectors, including education, local and national government, financial services, and many others. The Group has a strong reputation and a proven track record in delivery with engagement in 17 countries worldwide and an extensive and diverse range of virtualized solutions under management. Cutter Group has established its reputation as a market leader in the design, deployment, and support of virtualized solutions in both the desktop and data center environments. For more information, please visit www.cuttergrp.com.
CENIA, Czech Environmental Information Agency, is a state consultancy company under the Ministry of Environment of Czech Republic. CENIA collects and administers environmental data for the Czech Republic and provides independent environmental information in the economic and social context. Their main mission is to provide environment assessment and expected development of the state of the environment in the context of national trends and global megatrends. Decision and policy making support, continuous feedback, and advice are the key objectives of CENIA.
The virtual environment at CENIA stores anti-spam, lotus domino mail and application server, accounting, WSUS, application server, and a web server. “Any issues with the virtual infrastructure can have a direct impact on CENIA’s services (it is especially critical to have a recent backup of the accounting and shared data). That is why a backup solution is a vital component of maintaining our 24/7 availability,” says Petr Šmídek, ICT Administrator at CENIA.
Previously, CENIA used custom scripts as a method of data protection, but failed jobs, as well as long backup time were a common occurrence. “I noticed that it took a whole weekend for the previous solution to back up a VM with 1TB of data. In addition, the storage space was expanding rapidly. Basically, we decided to evaluate other available solutions on the market to ensure fast and consistent VM backups, and also offered reliable deduplication and compression,” says Petr.
exTerra Services introduced NAKIVO Backup & Replication to CENIA as a possible solution to problems with VM backup speed and increasing storage space. CENIA decided to switch to NAKIVO Backup & Replication due to a perfect combination of a rich feature set at a great price. “Initially, I was pleasantly surprised with how easy and intuitive the product is, appreciated the simplicity and clarity of the web interface, and also the fact that it does not overload the servers. We installed NAKIVO Backup & Replication on Ubuntu Linux by running a single command and started to perform VM backup to our NAS,” says Petr.
With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, CENIA was able to significantly improve VM backup speed in comparison to the agency’s previous solution. “I attribute this change to VMware CBT technology that enabled us to finally have incremental backup jobs. With VMware CBT technology, VM backup time is significantly reduced,” says Petr. Another option that Petr appreciates is the ability to create recovery points in the backup repository for each VM. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication there is an ability to save up to 1,000 recovery points per VM backup.
Finally, CENIA solved the problem with increasing storage space with NAKIVO’s data deduplication feature. “Deduplication is strong and we were able to decrease storage space by 50%. Previously, our storage was swamped with huge backups, but now with deduplication, we have more efficient disk space utilization and can store more recovery points per VM. Lastly, we tried instant VM recovery and instant file recovery and both features work to our complete satisfaction and would be life savers in a disaster situation,” says Petr.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides CENIA with 2X faster VM backup speed and storage savings. Thanks to automated email notifications, CENIA benefits from reliable backup. “Finally, VM backups finish correctly and do not require days of work. On average, I was able to save 5 hours per month of my own time that was previously spent on checking and controlling VM backups. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, I just get an email and I can see that VM backups finish successfully. With deduplication, we were able to decrease storage space by at least 50%. NAKIVO Backup & Replication solution delivers high performance and real-time alerts to ensure CENIA’s success,” says Petr.
CENIA, Czech Environmental Information Agency is an agency of the Ministry of Environment of the Czech Republic. CENIA’s mission is the collection, evaluation, interpretation, and distribution of environmental information. CENIA also manages the Integrated System of Reporting Obligations – ISPOP. This system ensures compliance with mandatory reporting legislation, which aims to protect the environment, while providing cross-sectional data for gaining essential environmental information. CENIA works with all providers of data sources within the environmental sector and with a number of scientific institutions and university departments. In the Czech Republic, CENIA is the main focal point for the European Environment Agency (EEA) and is involved in the European Environmental Information and Observation Network – EIONET. Several project teams are working together with CENIA on international and national based projects. All available sources of information, electronic versions of publications, including links and ways to use the resources and services that CENIA offers are available at www.cenia.cz.
Established in 1875, the Kantonsschule Hohe Promenade (KSHP) is a middle school in Zurich, Switzerland. There are over 700 students and 120 teachers at the school. While the school focuses on ancient and modern languages, the course of study also provides in-depth training on mathematics, natural sciences, as well as education on arts and sports.
KSHP’s IT infrastructure consists of one site. “In total we have approximately 40 servers: 20 physical servers and 20 ESXi hosts. VMware VMs mainly store web servers. Previously, we had only one web server that ran our website and we had all these dependencies that did not tie well together, so we decided to have a separate virtual machine for each task. VMware VMs are essential because if a disaster strikes, the whole gymnasium administration might not be accessible,” says Kurt H., ICT Administrator at KSHP.
The gymnasium has used a file-based backup solution previously, and while the solution was excellent for the physical servers, it was mediocre for the virtual machines. “I have tried several approaches to back up our virtual machines. Firstly, I tried to save backups with a file-based backup solution, but the storage space increased dramatically because the backup size grew too fast, so this approach did not work. Next, I tried a script-based solution, but it was not reliable and I could perform only one backup at a time, so I decided to look for another solution. I wanted to find a product that would significantly reduce the size of the backups and, ideally, allow me to use our Synology NAS,” says Kurt.
Kurt came across NAKIVO Backup & Replication online. In comparison to another solution that was up for consideration, NAKIVO Backup & Replication won with its flexible deployment options. “One backup solution required installing a Windows server infrastructure in order to operate, but our environment is a mix of Linux and Mac, so we did not want to use Windows just to be able to perform backup. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, there is quite a large choice of deployment options, and Synology NAS being the best one. I was actually surprised that the product can be installed on my NAS, turning it into a VM backup appliance.” The Synology NAS installation option allowed Kurt to use the available Synology NAS hardware, without incurring additional expenses or taking away resources from the virtual infrastructure. “The installation was quite easy and the product’s web interface is slick and clean. I was able to make use of the available hardware at the gymnasium, and also gained an all-in-one backup software, hardware, deduplication, compression and backups in one box,” says Kurt.
Compared to the previous data protection approaches, NAKIVO Backup & Replication demonstrated higher backup speed and great storage space savings. “We use NAKIVO Backup & Replication to perform backups every day and it usually takes around an hour to back up two clusters with three servers each. That helps me tremendously because I am able to perform backup within an hour at night and I will not experience any complaints from other colleagues the next day. As for the data deduplication, I saw huge space savings. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, I need less than 10% of the space to store my backups. Data deduplication works globally across the storage, so all backup data is taken into account. Lastly, I tested instant VM recovery and this feature is lightning fast, so I am confident that I will be able to recover our environment without much hardship. In the future, I believe that the backup copy feature could become an important addition for KSHP, with its ability to maintain backup copies onsite, offsite, and in the cloud,” says Kurt.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed on Synology NAS provides KSHP with faster VM backup and with 10:1 storage space savings due to global data deduplication and compression. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, there is an additional level of data protection because automatic emails provide information on whether backup jobs have finished successfully. “Past backup solutions did not provide automatic emails, so I had to manually check the storage to see if everything was there or not. NAKIVO Backup & Replication is fast and requires little storage space. I am quite happy with NAKIVO Backup & Replication because everything is working so well,” says Kurt.
The Kantonsschule Hohe Promenade (KSHP) is one of the 20 middle schools in Zurich, Switzerland. It admits students from sixth grade of the primary school and leads them to maturity. The curriculum includes the focus on ancient and modern languages, as well as in-depth math and science training, social sciences, and education in arts and sports. The goal of teachers is to promote educational progress of young children, improve, and evaluate their performance, as well as promote talented students. With its educational work, the gymnasium contributes to the development of students to become self-reliant and responsible. For more information, visit www.kshp.ch.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare is responsible for the administration of the public health system, social welfare, affordable and universal health care, hospitals, immunization programs, disease prevention, as well as supervision and coordination of local health agencies in Taiwan. The Social Welfare Organizations Administration Commission (SWOAC) at the Ministry of Health and Welfare was established in order to manage matters involving the administrative services of public health. The commission is comprised of 26 hospitals, 13 social welfare organizations, and more than 12,000 health professionals and social workers who serve at the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
The IT infrastructure at the commission supports the administrative services needed to accomplish the mission of health and well-being for all stakeholders. “We started to virtualize our environment in 2011 and up to this date we have over 200 VMware VMs. VMware VMs run hospital applications, such as PKI, HIS, Electronic official documentation, and others,” says Vincent Liu, System Planner at SWOAC.
Downtime at the commission would delay appropriate arrangement of administrative services, therefore, virtual environments must be protected at all times. “Previously, we practiced the traditional way to copy data to a USB disk from a VM. The recovery process was taking way too long because we had to re-install a VM and then restore data to that VM. For that reason, we decided to look for a more efficient way to protect and recover our VMware environment because we wanted to avoid downtime,” says Vincent. In addition to downtime and data loss avoidance, high availability across the entire environment was desirable.
SWOAC selected NAKIVO Backup & Replication to improve data protection in their virtual environment. “We needed a complete solution, not just a product. NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides efficient VM backup and recovery features. In addition, web interface is intuitive and easy to manage. NAKIVO’s technical pre-sales department in Taiwan demonstrated to us how to instantly restore our VMware environment and we were sold on the solution,” says Vincent.
Instant VM Recovery allows the commission to recover the full VM from the backup in just a few clicks. “Instant VM Recovery is the most essential feature. We no longer need to manually recreate the VM and then restore data to the VM. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the entire VM is recovered in exactly the same state as it was during the backup. Flash VM Boot recovers VMs in seconds, without waiting for full restore from backup files,” says Vincent.
While NAKIVO Backup & Replication was chosen based on its fast recovery capabilities, VM backup and global data deduplication brought additional benefits. “With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we can perform VM backup on schedule and considerably reduce storage space with global data deduplication. Another advantage is that backup image is not tied to the database, so that we can transfer backup image to other locations. We just need to deploy NAKIVO Backup & Replication appliance to a remote site and the backup image can be restored immediately,” says Vincent.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides SWOAC with fast VM backup and recovery. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the commission no longer spends extensive amount of time on VM recovery because Flash VM Boot enables instant recovery of VMware VMs. Moreover, VM backups can be conveniently scheduled and storage space reduction is beneficial. “Everyday we see money and time savings with NAKIVO Backup & Replication. Now, we have achieved highly available data protection in our virtual environment,” says Vincent.
The mission of Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) is to promote health and well-being of all citizens in Taiwan. The vision is to assure quality, increase efficiency, distribute resources equally, take care of social vulnerable groups, establish a welfare society, and contribute to the international affairs. To help accomplish its mission, the Hospital and Social Welfare Organizations Administration Commission was established in July 2013 to handle the matters involving administrative services for public health. The commission is comprised of 26 hospitals, 13 social welfare organizations, and more than 12,000 health professionals and social workers who serve at MOHW. In accordance with the mission of health and well-being for all, the emphasis is put on the collaboration of health care and social welfare, in order to perform a variety of tasks and services in public affairs. For more information, visit www.mohw.gov.tw.
Established in 1959 in Taoyuan City, Taiwan, China Airlines is one of the leading airline carriers in Asia. The company is headquartered in Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport and has over 12,600 employees as of August 2016. The airline operates in 4 continents, 143 destinations in 29 countries/districts, and deploys 92 aircraft.
China Airlines’ IT infrastructure consists of two data centers. “We have more than 60 VMware ESXi hosts and over 900 VMs. The VMs run our core applications, including our GPS system, Flight system, OA system, Microsoft SQL, Exchange, and file servers, and other workloads,” says Stivan Chou, China Airlines’ Representative.
At China Airlines, VMware VMs run both business-critical applications that are in charge of their daily operations and processes, and the airline’s website that provides customers with up to date information regarding flights, bookings, and check-in options. “We have to keep our data safe because we are in the aviation industry. Data loss and downtime will significantly impact our business, so in case of an emergency, we need to recover instantly,” says Stivan.
“With our previous backup software, VM recovery was always longer than we expected. Moreover, this legacy product did not support the latest version of VMware, so when we upgraded our system to the newest version, we could not do backups. We urgently needed to find another solution that could handle our 900 VMware VMs, perform fast VM backup and recovery, and read data directly from disks, bypassing the network,” says Stivan.
“We found NAKIVO Backup & Replication online and were instantly intrigued by its rich feature set,” says Stivan. While NAKIVO Backup & Replication can be installed on Windows and Linux, deployment as a pre-configured Virtual Appliance offers an additional simplicity and efficiency. “It was quite straightforward to import an OVA with NAKIVO Backup & Replication appliance into our vSphere environment. We did not have to install and configure an operating system. NAKIVO Backup & Replication appliance saves time and does not require constant attention,” says Stivan.
“It is imperative for us to save backup time because we have 900 VMs to deal with. Daily backups should be performed in 8 hours. After using Hot Add that reads data directly from source VM disks, bypassing the network, we were able to reduce backup times by about 10 hours weekly,” says Stivan. NAKIVO Backup & Replication automatically uses Hot Add to offload production LAN from the data protection traffic and increases the VMware backup and recovery speed.
The Flash VM Boot feature provided additional time savings for China Airlines. “VM recovery is way faster than with our previous backup solution. We use Flash VM Boot in emergency cases, and this feature has already saved us 2 hours of downtime,” says Stivan. The Flash VM Boot feature enables China Airlines to boot VMs directly from compressed and deduplicated backups, eliminating the need to recover the entire VM first.
In addition to instant VM recovery, global data deduplication provided significant storage space savings for China Airlines. “Global data deduplication is another amazing feature. It reduced our storage space by about 60% and allows us to store more recovery points per VM backup. In addition, we were able to save money on direct storage costs and other costs, such as maintenance,” says Stivan. NAKIVO Backup & Replication automatically deduplicates VM backups at the block level and saves only unique data to the backup repository.
With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, China Airlines performs VM backups every day. The company has reduced the backup time by 10 hours weekly with the Hot Add feature. Due to Instant VM Recovery, China Airlines achieved near-instant VM recovery and also reduced storage space by 60% with global data deduplication. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication is an outstanding product that offers great features and does not break the budget. The product saved management time by 35% and reduced our VMware backup budget by 30%,” says Stivan.
Since being founded in 1959, China Airlines has been dedicated to delivering the best in-flight experience and quality to satisfy each passenger. Being one of the leading airlines in Asia, China Airlines provides routes to 4 continents including commercial flights and freight services. While joining SkyTeam as the 15th member on September 28th, 2011, China Airlines provides more services and promotional packages, connecting 178 countries and reaching more than 1,000 destinations. Its fleet consists of 92 Airbus and Boeing aircraft, including 71 passenger jets and 21 freighters. The airline’s subsidiaries include low-cost carriers Mandarin Airlines and Tigerair Taiwan. China Airlines is committed to the best flight quality, safety, and treasure every encounter. For more information, visit www.china-airlines.com.
Headquartered in Duisburg, Germany, FEhS–Institut für Baustoff-Forschung e.V. has substantial experience in investigation and development of applications for industrial co-products and residues, especially in iron and steelmaking. The company performs research on national and international level in the area of by-products, consulting in the field of recycling building materials and landfill, and evaluation of research projects.
“Our environment is quite simple. We have one site, one blade server housing with four used slots. The four machines are holding a total number of around 16 VMs. We also have one standalone server for our Oracle DB,” says Rene Griesa, Data Processing Manager at FEhS. “The applications that we have are Microsoft Exchange, WSUS, DNS, Licensing, VPN, Home and Groupshares, and Remote Workstations.”
The main focus of FEhS is research, development, and consulting, and so VM backup and VM recovery are imperative for the success of the business. “Most of our research depends on an immense amount of historical data. Without a proper backup, we run a chance of losing historical data that was collected during the last 20 years,” says Rene. Previously, the institute protected its data with a legacy backup solution, however, the solution caused problems since jobs were failing constantly.
The previous backup solution did not work correctly with deduplicated Windows 2012 volumes and that caused even more problems for the IT department. “I spent a considerable amount of time in the evening and on the weekends monitoring the VM backups. The backup solution gave me e-mail updates that backup jobs completed successfully. However, the core problem was that if I wanted to recover files, VM backups were not functional. Sometimes, the product recovered 20% of the files, other times 50%, but never all the files. Eventually, we found that deduplication from our Windows 2012 Server was causing this and saw that it was the fault of the backup solution,” says Rene.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication was introduced to FEhS by their partner. The institute selected the pre-configured Virtual Appliance deployment option. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication was installed in a couple of minutes with the pre-configured Virtual Appliance. The configuration was simple and straightforward. After the installation, the first backup job ran for about 30 minutes – it just worked out of the box,” says Rene. “The web interface is clear and you can always find the things you need without long searches,” says Rene.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides features aimed to improve VM backup reliability, usability, and performance. For example, entire VMs can be recovered in just a few clicks – there is no need to manually recreate a VM, install an OS, and then restore data. “I performed a test recovery for a VM and noticed that not only everything worked smoothly, but also the recovery was quite fast. In a real disaster recovery situation, this feature would save days,” says Rene.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides significant storage space reduction with global data deduplication. This feature is available out of the box, enabled by default, and does not require any setup or configuration. “Global data deduplication feature is a must have for us. It saves us real money on a daily basis. Not only were we able to significantly reduce storage space, but we also saved money on maintenance, electricity, and cooling,” says Rene.
The screenshot verification feature provides an automated way to instantly verify VMware VM backups and sends screenshots of the restored VMs as a proof of recoverability. “Without a doubt, screenshot verification is a cool feature. You can hold back a history of successful and working VM backups. The feature is a time saver,” says Rene. “I see that my VM backups are successful and I can recover files from them, so basically, I do not have to spend time on backup administration and maintenance,” says Rene.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication has impressed FEhS with its usability, flexibility, and features. Rene is also satisfied with the fast and professional level of support that he receives. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a powerful software. From the really clear web interface to the fast and helpful support,” says Rene. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication solved the problems with our deduplicated volumes on the main data server. Now we have a working, fast, and affordable backup solution for all our demands. I can confidently say that we trust NAKIVO Backup & Replication!” says Rene.
With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, FEhS reduced backup administration time and storage space. “With NAKIVO, we saved more than 50% on backup administration. I no longer spend my evenings and weekends on VM backups maintenance. In addition, we reduced our storage space by approximately 30%,” says Rene. “We are happy that we chose NAKIVO Backup & Replication because now we have time to spend on our other IT administration tasks,” says Rene.
Founded in 1950, FEhS–Institut für Baustoff-Forschung e.V. checks and monitors industrial by-products, such as iron and steel slags, and other building products. The institute is a part of an extensive network of research institutes, laboratories, and interest groups. Registered members of the institute include steel mills, cement plants, and processing companies. FEhS explores potential uses of mill slags and residues, consults construction companies, and dispatches experts to national and international committees for standardization. Moreover, research is performed on secondary raw materials/slag metallurgy, with the aim to optimize the production process and use resources efficiently in terms of environmental and sustainable steelmaking. Lastly, FEhS develops and enhances processes for the production of fertilizers out of industrial by-products and develops measures to improve environmental performance. For more information, visit www.fehs.de.
The IT infrastructure at Radisson Park Inn hotel in Tallinn runs on VMware: “Almost all of our mission-critical services are virtualized,” says Roland Kalijurand, IT Manager at the Radisson Park Inn Hotel. “Most of our VMware VMs are Windows servers with SQL databases that run different services and operations, necessary for the successful hotel management and daily operation,” says Roland.
All services at Radisson Park Inn require stable and dependable data protection. Safeguarding virtual infrastructure that supports hotel internal processes and contains customer’s personal information is highly important to Roland. “A VM backup solution should be reliable, easy to administer, and provide fast backup and short recovery times,” he says.
However, the previous VM backup solution used by Radisson Park Inn failed to meet these requirements. “Our previous VM backup product was giving us a lot of problems. It was constantly crashing, and we had to spend a lot of time to bring it back to life. But its biggest issue was the amount of storage it needed to perform backups. We needed a better VM backup solution which would be stable and which would not take a lot of storage space” says Roland. That is why, Roland began looking for a replacement to their existing VM backup solution that would meet the company’s requirements.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication was recommended to Roland by Telegrupp AS – a leading system integrator and IT solution provider in Estonia that specializes in providing a wide range of IT services and products.
First off, Roland was impressed with the ease of deployment of the product. “We installed and configured NAKIVO Backup & Replication within minutes. All required components – like the database – were already there, all features worked out the box, and we did not have to deploy any agents,” says Roland.
Furthermore, NAKIVO Backup & Replication features a simple and intuitive Web interface to reduce backup administration complexity. “In comparison to our past VM backup solution, NAKIVO Backup & Replication proved to be simpler and more flexible,” says Roland. “Setting up new backup jobs was a breeze.”
Built for virtualization, NAKIVO Backup & Replication uses native VMware APIs and relies on architecture optimized for performance to deliver highest VM backup speeds. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication completed VM backup jobs faster than our previous backup solution,” says Roland.
After running a number of backup jobs, Roland has compared the size of VM backups created by NAKIVO Backup & Replication to the size of backups created by their previous product. “The amount of storage space reduction we got with NAKIVO Backup & Replication’s was truly awesome. We achieved 3X reduction in storage space!” says Roland. NAKIVO Backup & Replication automatically deduplicates backed up data at the block level across entire backup repository and this dramatically reduces the size of VM backups. After data is deduplicated, the product automatically compresses each data block so it occupies even less storage space in the backup repository.
In addition, to performance improvement and storage space reduction, NAKIVO Backup & Replication has also boosted VM recovery time. “With the Flash VM Boot feature, we were able to recover entire VMs from backups in a matter of seconds,” says Roland. Full VM recovery can be a very long and stressful process that can fail after hours of waiting and will have to be started over again. With the Flash VM Boot feature, VMs can be recovered within seconds by booting them directly from compressed and deduplicated VM backups. Flash VM Boot works out of the box for all VM backups and does not require any special recovery environment.
After a long evaluation and testing period, Roland was satisfied with NAKIVO Backup & Replication reliability as backup jobs ran successfully and the product did not crash or need any administration. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication turned out to be perfect for us: the product proved to deliver fast and reliable VM backups, saved storage space with deduplication and compression, and improved VM recovery time,” says Roland.
Radisson Park Inn hotel now uses NAKIVO Backup & Replication to protect and recover their business-critical VMware VMs. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication proved to be superior to our previous VM backup solution,” says Roland.
Due to global data deduplication and compression, Radisson Park Inn Hotel has reduced backup storage space by 3X. “We have also significantly improved our recovery time as we can now near-instantly recover VMs directly from the backup repository with Flash VM Boot,” says Roland.
Radisson Hotels is an international hotel chain company that was founded in 1909 in Minnessota, USA. Radisson Hotels are featured in the world’s most desirable destinations across the globe, with the majority of the hotels located in the United States. There are several Radisson brands, including Radisson Blu, Park Inn by Radisson, Park Plaza, Country Inns and Suits, and Raddison RED. The World of Radisson includes a range of features tailored to the needs of busy travelers. What makes Radisson a world’s leading full-service hotel brand is not only the round the clock range of guest touch point communication tools and physical attributes, but also it is about treating every guest in the way they would expect and deserve to be treated. For more information, visit www.radissonhotels.com.
SoftNAS Inc. is the leading provider of software-defined NAS solutions and protects business-critical data for customers using any combination of public, private, and hybrid clouds. Virtual infrastructure at SoftNAS consists of 16 VMware ESXi hosts and 105 VMs. “We run our R&D lab on VMware,” says Rick Braddy, Founder and CEO/CTO of SoftNAS, Inc. “This includes VMs for software development, Quality Assurance, build machine, as well infrastructure VMs, such as Windows domain controller, vCenter, remote desktop jump boxes, and our storage server.”
As a part of their data protection strategy, SoftNAS decided to back up mission-critical VMs to cloud for disaster recovery. “The ability to keep our VMware backups in Amazon Cloud – which is secure, reliable, and cost-effective – would give us a piece of mind and enable us to recover our VMs in case of a disaster,” says Rick. However, their existing VMware backup solution did not provide built-in cloud backup and restore capabilities. On top of that, the solution had a number of other issues. VM backup deduplication worked only at the job level, which means that data was deduplicated only for backups of a single job. For SoftNAS, the choice was either to back up all VMs by one job with the same schedule and options or have separate jobs (as business needs suggested) but lose storage space due to duplicate data in the backup repository. In addition, overly complex interface lead to time-consuming VM backup configuration and maintenance, which had to be done via an RDP session to a backup machine. “The downsides of our existing VMware backup solution combined with a high yearly maintenance cost made us start looking for an alternative,” says Rick.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication has been designed to seamlessly plug into VMware environment and provides a simple and intuitive web interface. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication was far easier to set up and configure compared to our previous VMware backup solution,” says Rick. “Backup administration via Web interface is easier to access and works fast.”
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides built-in backup to the cloud that comes at no cost. Backup to Amazon Cloud has been designed to be very simple: “All we had to do is type in Amazon Cloud credentials, enter the required amount of space for backups, and click a single button – NAKIVO Backup & Replication has automatically created a new backup repository for us in the cloud,” says Rick. “After the setup was complete, we were able to back up our VMware environment directly to the cloud and we can now perform recoveries at any time and from anywhere.”
To save storage space, NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides global data deduplication for VMware VM backups. The product automatically deduplicates VM backups at the block level and ensures that only unique data is saved in the backup repository. All VM backups are deduplicated across entire backup repository – regardless of how many backup jobs have been created, NAKIVO Backup & Replication checks each new data block for duplicates across entire backup repository. After data is deduplicated, the product automatically compresses each block of data so it occupies even less storage space in a backup repository. Both data deduplication and compression features are built-in, enabled by default, work out of the box, and come at no cost.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides near-instant operational recovery via VMware VM replication, which creates and maintains identical copies of source VMs on target ESXi hosts. VM copies – called replicas – are regular VMware VMs that are available in VMware vSphere. VM replicas remain in the powered off state and do not consume any resources, yet they can be simply powered on, for near-instant recovery. In addition, up to 30 recovery points can be saved for each VM replica. Each recovery point is a regular VMware VM snapshot, so if a source VM has been damaged, replicas can be easily rolled back to a previous good state even without NAKIVO Backup & Replication.
SoftNAS is now using NAKIVO Backup & Replication to protect their virtualized environment both locally and to the cloud. NAKIVO Backup & Replication enables SoftNAS to back up their mission-critical VMs to Amazon Cloud for disaster recovery. “I have a peace of mind knowing that even if a disaster strikes, our business-critical data is always recoverable from an offsite backup in Amazon Cloud,” says Rick. For operational recovery, SoftNAS is using replication. “VMware replication is entirely transparent with NAKIVO,” says Rick. “Should we lose an important VM or even an entire ESXi server, we can near-instantly go back online by powering on VM replicas in the vSphere client even without using NAKIVO Backup & Replication.”
NAKIVO Backup & Replication has also provided SoftNAS with storage savings. Due to global data deduplication and compression, which work across entire backup repository, SoftNAS has saved 25% of storage space for VM backups vs. their previous data protection solution.
SoftNAS has upgraded to NAKIVO Backup & Replication for less than the cost of yearly maintenance for their previous VMware backup solution. “With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we have saved more than 50% vs. maintenance of our previous VM backup solution, and have additionally saved 25% more in storage space costs with better deduplication, lowering our backup expenses by 75% overall.”
SoftNAS®, Inc. is the leading provider of software-defined NAS solutions and protects mission-critical data for customers using any combination of public, private and hybrid clouds. SoftNAS gives its customers the enterprise-class data security, protection, and performance required to safely, predictably, and reliably operate IT systems and applications. SoftNAS believes in powerful, hassle-free data management and works with any hardware, any data type, across any geography, and with any IT environment, including the most popular public, private, and hybrid cloud computing platforms: Amazon® AWS™, Microsoft® Azure™, CenturyLink Cloud®, VMware vSphere® and service providers. SoftNAS is #1 best-selling NAS filer in the cloud, and the winner of multiple awards, including Red Herring Top 100 Award 2015 and Datacentre ICT Cloud Storage Product of the Year. For more information, refer to www.buurst.com.