Australian School Switches to NAKIVO and Saves 60% on Backup Costs

Business Challenge

Lakes Grammar is an independent co-educational Christian school, providing a broad education for students from kindergarten to grade 12. The school emphasizes the development of intellectual quality in a supportive learning environment and encourages students to adopt a personal Christian faith as the foundation for living. Offering a range of sporting, cultural, and other co-curricular opportunities, the school aims to meet the needs of students in a secure, caring, supportive Christian community.

The school has one main campus with multiple buildings and three physical hosts with 30+ virtual machines running in their environment. Virtual machines store Microsoft SQL, file servers, mail servers, and other services running on both Windows and Linux operating systems. A reliable backup solution is vital for business continuity and maintaining data availability. If critical data becomes unavailable, the school risks disrupting their services for students, as teachers will not be able to access the files they need to teach.

Initially, the school was backing up to disk. This remained their procedure after they moved to a VMware backup solution. Later, the school migrated their environment from VMware to Nutanix, and they decided to change their backup solution, as well. Other solutions on the market had particular Nutanix version requirements put in place, which was an issue for the school. The main criteria for any new solution were ease-of-use, low implementation costs, and the compatibility of the product with their current backup storage. NAKIVO Backup & Replication was easy to set up and implement and provided all the needed functionality for the school from the start.

Solution

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides data protection for virtual, physical, cloud, and SaaS environments. NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers fast and reliable data protection for Nutanix AHV environments, as well as for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. NAKIVO Backup & Replication seamlessly integrates into Nutanix AHV environments and provides agentless, application-aware, and incremental VM backup. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can streamline data protection routines, save time, reduce costs, and optimize the use of IT resources.

“NAKIVO Backup & Replication was simple to set up and has efficient storage of backup data on our QNAP storage. In reality, you always take a keen interest in your backups, however, our experience has been very much different – a set it and forget it approach. Installing and configuring NAKIVO Backup & Replication could not have been easier. As soon as the virtual machine was added into our Nutanix environment, everything from that point was configured from the web interface,” says Brett MacLarty, IT Manager at Lakes Grammar.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication uses native change tracking technology – Nutanix Changed Regions Tracking – to identify and back up only unique data blocks and thus save storage space. Moreover, LAN-free data transfer and network acceleration improve backup performance and reduce backup time. “We back up on a daily basis and the entire backup takes approximately 50 minutes. Ease of use for the backup and recovery jobs is fantastic. Information and alerts from NAKIVO Backup & Replication are easy to action, with plenty of support information available from within the console. Overall, there have been so few issues that we have not contacted support,” says Brett.

Results

“Ease of use and simplicity is what we like most about NAKIVO Backup & Replication. Our Nutanix environment is reliably protected with the solution. Migrating our previous solution to support Nutanix quickly became cost prohibitive for the school. The initial savings of switching to NAKIVO Backup & Replication was 60%, with an ongoing maintenance savings of 50% each year. NAKIVO Backup & Replication will continue backing up our new virtual machines in our Nutanix environment, as our environment changes,” says Brett.

About Lakes Grammar

Lakes Grammar is a co-educational Anglican school based at the northern end of the central coast of Australia. With a little over 900 students, Lakes Grammar sets high academic and behavioral standards for the students within the context of Christian care for their well-being and growth as individuals. The school has two distinct spaces, junior school (K to 6) and senior school (7 to 12), providing students with the tailored environments they need to grow and develop throughout their schooling years. Junior school and senior school are joined by an internal boardwalk that ensures easy access between the buildings. For more information, visit www.lakes.nsw.edu.au.