NAKIVO Helps a Media Company Save Bandwidth Costs over Three Years

Business Challenge

Zambia Daily Mail is an English-language daily newspaper published in Zambia. The newspaper covers general news, business news, sport news, and other current topics.

The newspaper’s IT infrastructure is made up of 12 physical servers and over 30 virtual machines. Virtual machines run databases, custom news management and publication software, news files, and advertising materials. The company runs mission-critical applications that operate 24/7. Backup and replication are essential to meet business continuity objectives. The newspaper aims to minimize disruption to the business by avoiding any detrimental impact on its data. Ensuring replicated systems are on standby is vital in order to provide resilience in the event of a crisis.

Previously, Zambia Daily Mail relied on open-source software for backups, which was resource-intensive and slow in data restorations. This impacted the business negatively, as there was no restoration of granular files, making the file restoration and data integrity testing procedures cumbersome. Reconfigurations were performed on a daily basis just to ensure data was recoverable.

Zambia Daily Mail started to look for a solution that was not resource-intensive and did not demand day-to-day monitoring or checkups to confirm that it was working properly. They needed a robust and easy-to-configure solution for both their physical servers and virtual machines.

Solution

During the evaluation process of 8 backup solutions, Zambia Daily Mail found that NAKIVO Backup & Replication proved to be lightweight and fast in executing backups. Agentless deployment meant that Zambia Daily Mail could target any of their available infrastructure for replication. The licensing costs proved to be manageable in comparison to the other solutions on the market, which have complex licensing contracts with hidden charges.

“We installed NAKIVO Backup & Replication on a standalone physical server, which is in isolation from all the main infrastructure. Installation was seamless, as everything was completed within 10 minutes, with all configurations in place. Repositories are easy to add with notifications that are sent on time,” says Emmanuel Kalenge Senior ICT Engineer at Zambia Daily Mail.

“On average, we need six to eight hours for full backups and about two hours for incremental backups of our critical data. Support for multiple repositories that can point to different storage silos is a big plus for us, as well as excellent memory management by the backup solution. We no longer need to spend hours monitoring backups, as everything is pretty much automated,” says Emmanuel.

“With VM backup, we have observed a 40% increase in backup speed for our VMs, even on a network that is slow in speed. While granular instant recovery proved useful in the event of restoring specific files that are misplaced or lost by our field reporters and editors,” says Emmanuel.

“Technical support has been excellent and available through the onsite chat that does not need a call. Our team can remotely log in the chat and address issues directly, thus saving us time,” says Emmanuel.

Results

“Overall, we can estimate about $500,000 savings in time and bandwidth costs for a period of three years while using NAKIVO Backup & Replication. The software rarely requires our attention and generates detailed daily reports for our records. We achieved faster file recoveries with granular instant recovery, as well as faster VM replication. In addition, we have been able to efficiently plan our storage requirements and ensure our CAPEX is within approved limits. This has impacted performance in that we can channel more resources to other sectors of the business,” says Emmanuel.

About Zambia Daily Mail

Zambia Daily Mail Ltd is the leading government-owned media outlet, serving over 150,000 newsreaders and advertisement publishers daily. Spanning across the entire country, Zambia Daily Mail’s office network is interlinked to ensure information flows without interruption, so as to have the capability to deliver news content on a daily basis. For more information, visit www.daily-mail.co.zm.