Business Challenge

Virtual infrastructure at La Servizi Informatici SA (LASI) consists of approximately 200 VMware VMs. “Almost all of our mission critical services are virtualized,” says Marco Mirra, CEO at La Servizi Informatici SA. “Our VMs are running a wide range of services: Web sites, database servers, remote servers, dedicated appliances (including VoIP systems and surveillance systems), and digital signage.”

All LASI services require constant and reliable data protection. Safeguarding infrastructure for high priority customers and providing a full set of services for all customers is important to Marco. Moreover, Marco has a lengthy list of requirements that a data protection solution should meet: “The ideal data protection solution should offer us a rich feature set coupled with a good price and a high level of support, and the most importantly, provide fast and frequent VM backups,” says Marco. However, the previous VM backup solution used by LASI failed to meet these requirements.

“As a key element of our disaster recovery process, we were spending over 20 hours a month manually testing the backups of our customer’s VMs to ensure they had recoverable VM backups in case of a disaster. We could have deployed an entire sandbox environment for scripted testing of VM backups but the software and hardware infrastructure required would have been cost prohibitive. We needed a more cost effective VM backup solution that could not only automatically test our customer’s backups, but also do it without an additional hardware or software licenses from VMware, Microsoft, and the backup vendor,” says Marco.

The disadvantages of the previous VM data solution led Marco to search for a replacement. A rich feature set and fast VM backups were a priority for a new backup solution. Moreover, a solution would have to be of a better price, so that not only costs will be minimized, but also data solution functionality will have to be more efficient.

Solution

In search for a VM backup solution, Marco referred to Avangate Italia Srl. – the leader in data protection and security solutions distribution in Italy, and the NAKIVO Gold Partner. Through a network of over 5,000 partners across the country, Avangate Italia offers solutions to international companies, public administration, SMEs, and IT professionals. Avangate Italia selects the best solutions available on the market according to various parameters that can make a difference to the success of each of its partners.

Following Avangate Italia’s recommendation, Marco tried NAKIVO Backup & Replication and was impressed with the simplicity and speed of deployment and overall ease of use that the product provided. “In comparison to the past and other evaluated products, NAKIVO proved to be simpler and faster,” he says. “NAKIVO clearly freed up time and resources for our multiple tasks.”

“Since manually testing our customer’s VM backups was tedious and time-consuming, we wanted automatic testing and verification of our customer’s VM backups and that became possible with NAKIVO’s screenshot verification feature,” says Marco. “With screenshot verification, we were able to reduce the time for DR testing from more than 20 hours a month to less than 1 hour, without additional hardware and software requirements. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we are sure that each VM backup is verified because screenshots of test-recovered VMs are sent as proof of recoverability.”

After each job run, NAKIVO Backup & Replication creates a recovery point in the backup repository. Once a VM backup is completed, NAKIVO Backup & Replication recovers the VM from the recovery point, disables networking on the VM to prevent network connections, and makes a screenshot of the OS. After that, the report with the screenshot is sent via email.

In addition, NAKIVO Backup & Replication has recently introduced installation on Synology NAS and this allowed Marco to improve VM backup performance even more. “The new direct NAS installation feature allowed us to take advantage of an existing Synology NAS to be used natively for VM backups, freeing up host resources, and unifying all VM data protection components in a single system,” says Marco.

Results

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is now used to protect VMware environment at LASI and has immediately demonstrated results in installation, configuration, usage, and performance. “The possibility to connect more than one network interface to a single virtual appliance and split jobs, as well as create a high-performance VM backup appliance with Synology NAS, has already improved our VMware VMs performance substantially,” says Marco. However, the greatest result was in reducing time of the disaster recovery process. “With NAKIVO and screenshot verification feature, we saved 90% of time that was previously spent on manual testing of our customer’s VM backups. Now, we can postpone hiring additional IT resource to just cover disaster recovery testing, as our cloud business continues to expand,” says Marco.

Company Profile

La Servizi Informatici Srl (LASI) is an information technology services company that is located in Rivera, Switzerland. The company started as a hosting and mail services provider and later progressed to a series of data centers (located both in Italy and in Switzerland) to meet the increasing needs of multiple customers. La Servizi Informatici SA (LASI) team consists of professionals who are experts in services linked to Internet, hosting, domain registration, and virtual servers. Valuable skills and knowledge have enabled LASI to become a reference point for small to medium-sized businesses who do not have significant infrastructure, but want the opportunities of evolving technology, without sacrificing high quality and reliability.