Law Firm Switches to NAKIVO and Boosts VM Backup Speed by 4X
Business Challenge
Established in 1898, Buren is an internationally oriented corporate law firm. Over the years, Buren has assisted many clients with cross-border transactions and litigation matters. They provide corporate, commercial, tax, labor, intellectual property, and regulatory counsel to clients across all industries. Buren has carefully established a network with reputable law firms and other service providers abroad, allowing them to assist their clients in navigating global business transactions.
Headquartered in The Hague, Buren has several secondary offices around the world, including locations in Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Beijing, and Shanghai. All additional offices are connected to the main headquarters, and all Buren’s data is stored onsite in the Hyper-V VMs at The Hague location. The Hyper-V VMs run standard office applications as well as Microsoft Exchange and SQL servers. As Buren’s lawyers and notaries assist clients in different time zones all over the world, their IT environment should ultimately be available 24/7. As Buren has grown into a larger law firm during the recent years, naturally, the firm has accumulated a significant amount of historical data that needs to be regularly backed up and recovered quickly in case of a disaster. Most of Buren’s historical data is confidential client information that needs to be kept onsite because of the certain legal and privacy aspects. If anything happens to such data, Buren runs the risk of breaking attorney-client privilege and losing clients.
A short time ago, Buren relied on a legacy backup solution for data protection. “That product was ultimately too old-fashioned and could not help us meet our 24/7 availability requirements. The legacy backup solution was backing up physical machines rather than virtual machines, and all the backups were going to tape. That sort of approach naturally took forever. The situation was not healthy – we were sometimes waiting a whole week for a physical machine to be backed up! Moreover, the whole process was putting additional pressure on our IT team, as we had to constantly monitor the legacy backup tool,” says Fabiano Zulliani, System Administrator at Buren.
“As our data was growing rapidly, we finally decided to look for a proper VM backup solution, with the aim of having forever-incremental backup capabilities, rather than just doing full physical machine backup every time. We wanted an easy-to-use software product that anyone in our IT department could manage without extra technical knowledge or special training,” adds Fabiano.
Solution
While reading online about VM backup options, Fabiano discovered NAKIVO Backup & Replication and decided try the product out. The decision to select NAKIVO Backup & Replication was made on the second day of testing, as a result of the product’s simplicity and ease-of-use. Now, NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides the firm with full VM backup, forever-incremental backup, and instant file recovery functionalities. Moreover, NAKIVO Backup & Replication’s installation on Synology NAS made the switch even easier. “We were slowly undergoing internal changes by transitioning from the previous legacy backup tool to NAKIVO Backup & Replication and Synology. We already had a Synology NAS in the office, but we never used the box for backup. When we saw that NAKIVO Backup & Replication could be installed on Synology NAS, we couldn’t resist trying it,” says Fabiano.
“The main advantage of the NAS integration is that no extra investment in other infrastructure resources or additional hardware is required. Instead of having a separate backup server, which I would need to maintain, the Synology NAS server was already there. All we had to do was install NAKIVO Backup & Replication and run our first backup job. On top of that, the Synology-based VM backup appliance uses built-in processing capabilities, allowing us to use our resources for other IT needs, “says Fabiano.
By switching to NAKIVO Backup & Replication, Buren can now protect their Hyper-V VMs with forever-incremental backup and dramatically increase their VM backup speed. “We schedule our backup jobs during the afternoon or evening hours for our Hague office. Now that we can finally back up only the changed data, the backup process no longer takes up a long time. It’s quite refreshing to start our backup jobs in the evening and finish them before morning. Overall, we increased backup speed by at least 4X, while saving our own personal time and effort,” says Fabiano.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides built-in features to save storage space, such as global data deduplication and compression. As a result, Buren freed up storage space on the Synology NAS server, allowing them to store more VM backups. “As we keep several recovery points on a weekly, monthly, and even yearly basis, storage space is valuable. Compression was a tremendous help, allowing us to keep more storage space for VM backups,” says Fabiano.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication’s instant file recovery feature allows Buren to search for files and recover them immediately if they are accidentally lost or deleted. “I already had to do a couple of file recoveries, because somebody deleted some files. Everything was quick – within a minute or two, all files were recovered, and were available to send over email,” says Fabiano. In the near future, Fabiano also plans on taking advantage of the product’s Hyper-V replication functionality, with an aim to create and maintain VM replicas offsite.
Results
NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed on Synology NAS provides Buren law firm with full VM backup, forever-incremental VM backup, and instant file recovery. With forever-incremental backup, the firm improved VM backup speed by 4X, as only changed data gets transferred to the backup repository. With instant file recovery, Buren can quickly search for and recover files should they get accidentally deleted. In addition, because of the product’s compression capabilities, Buren can now store more VM backups, as more storage space remains available. “At last, our VM backups are fast and backup jobs finish successfully every time, without any errors. We no longer spend days on backup administration, and we can use the time we save for other IT tasks. Our management was able to cut costs, while our IT team is happy with the easy setup, flexibility, and management. NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed on Synology NAS was a life-saver for our business,” says Fabiano.
About Buren Law Firm
Buren is an internationally oriented corporate law firm with offices in Amsterdam, Beijing, The Hague, Luxembourg, and Shanghai. They have a diversified business practice and a rich heritage dating back to 1898. At Buren, over 70 lawyers, notaries, and international tax lawyers provide a full range of services to clients worldwide. In the coming years, Buren is committed to expanding and enhancing their existing practices. For more information, please visit www.burenlegal.com.