NAKIVO Helps Media Company with Disaster Recovery Orchestration
Business Challenge
Guardian Media Limited is a media company headquartered in Trinidad and Tobago. Guardian operates in the print, radio, and television sectors, with a portal offering news headlines on its site along with an e-paper and streaming of local content.
Guardian Media’s IT infrastructure consists of 4 sites, 6 physical servers, and 70 virtual machines. The virtual machines run websites, line of business applications like Microsoft GP, and various financial and production applications. As a multimedia organization, the company highly relies on data availability. Loss of applications or data could result in lost revenue and customers due to downtime and inability to fulfill SLAs.
Previously, Guardian Media relied on site-to-site replication. However, that process became too costly and challenging to manage as the organization’s data expanded. With the previous approach, backups took too long to complete, and too much time was spent on verifying whether those backups were in a working condition. Moreover, recovery time was also too long and even led to revenue loss. Guardian Media decided to look for a new solution that was compatible with the newest version of VMware and was easy to operate and manage. This was challenging, as most solutions on the market were having compatibility issues with VMware updates.
Solution
“I did all the research and came across many solution providers. I reached out for demos and tested them extensively in our environment. In the end, NAKIVO Backup & Replication stood out with the solution’s compatibility with older virtual environments, along with the ease-of-use and flexibility within our environment,” says Nicholas Attai, Network Administrator and Security Engineer at Guardian Media.
“Installing NAKIVO Backup & Replication was extremely easy, as well as adding various VMs in the web interface,” says Nicholas. “Initial backup of the entire environment took a couple of days, but incremental backups take about 3 hours. Backups are done on a nightly basis. We enjoy the email notifications and automatic reports that help us know the quality of our backups. With the network acceleration functionality, we cut our backup times from 7 to about 3 hours.”
“With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we are able to bring up a VM that exists in one environment to another virtual environment from a backup without any issues. This helped us move our entire virtual infrastructure to a new environment with very little downtime, which did not impact the business at all,” says Nicholas. “Site recovery is key in bringing up an environment from a failed state and maintaining service availability and business continuity during a disaster. Ultimately, Site Recovery worked flawlessly for us.”
Results
“Previous solutions were definitely more expensive, and with assistance from the NAKIVO’s technical support, we were able to find the license structure that best suited our environment,” says Nicholas. “Technical support has been responsive and willing to assist us with any questions we had. I cannot thank NAKIVO’s support enough. NAKIVO Backup & Replication provided us a sense of security, in a sense that, if we were ever in a predicament, due to a failure of our virtual environment, we can easily use Site Recovery and swiftly failover/failback without any data loss. NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a fully automated solution that has made our disaster recovery orchestration much simpler.”
About Guardian Media Limited
Guardian Media Limited runs a multimedia operation with a presence in print, radio, television, electronic billboards, and digital media, making the company the most comprehensive media company in the Caribbean. Most of Guardian Media’s operations are in Trinidad and Tobago, with the Guardian newspaper, CNC3 television, six radio stations, electronic billboards, and an increasingly strong digital presence. Guardian Media was recently restructured to reflect the converging needs of today’s media operations and to make the most of digital media opportunities. Instead of platform-specific vertical divisions, the company now has a more dynamic and flexible structure focused on content, sales, and operations. For more information, visit www.guardian.co.tt.