NAKIVO Helps Museum Improve VM Recovery

Business Challenge

The South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology is dedicated entirely to Ötzi, or the Iceman, a human mummy more than 5,000 years old. The Ötzi exhibition is housed on the three floors of the museum and displays everything of interest about the world’s most famous glacier mummy. The exhibition covers the circumstances surrounding Ötzi’s accidental discovery on September 19, 1991, the international media response, the original finds themselves (the mummy together with its clothing and equipment), daily life in the Copper Age, and multidisciplinary research.

The museum has one site in Bolzano, Italy, and their IT infrastructure consists of 2 physical servers and 10 virtual machines. The virtual machines store all data necessary for the museum’s daily operations. In addition, Microsoft Office applications, a Microsoft SQL database, a remote desktop server, financial management applications, applications for booking museum visits, and infrastructure management applications are also virtualized and stored in the virtual machines. For the museum, data preservation is the top priority. Data loss or downtime could lead to the temporary closure of the museum, with a great financial impact and wide repercussions in the media.

Previously, the museum relied on backup to tape with another vendor. Backup to tape was a rather outdated method that required frequent changes of tapes, limited capacity, and long recovery times. Moreover, the whole process was rather difficult to manage. The museum started looking for a data protection solution designed specifically for virtualized environments. The museum’s main requirements were greater flexibility and ease of use. The museum’s technical partner recommended NAKIVO Backup & Replication, and the software fully satisfied the museum’s criteria.

Solution

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a state-of-the-art data protection solution and is designed specifically for virtualized environments running on VMware, Hyper-V, or Amazon EC2. NAKIVO Backup & Replication keeps your IT running and your data safe at a fraction of the cost in comparison with the other vendors in the industry. NAKIVO Backup & Replication is worth the switch given the “one product” principle, where the product covers all needs in terms of backup, replication, and recovery. The South Tyrol Museum of Archeology appreciates NAKIVO Backup & Replication due to easy configuration and reliability in day-to-day IT operations.

“The software installation and configuration are extremely easy, while the web user interface is clearly laid out and warnings are well presented. Currently, NAKIVO Backup & Replication is installed as a virtual server on a host. The backup takes place on a QNAP NAS and local hard drives,” says Andrea Battagin, System Administrator at the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides efficient backups and ensures that VMs, data, and applications are recoverable within minutes. With VM backup, one can create image-based, incremental, application-aware backups of virtual machines. Backup jobs can also be automated with various backup policies in order to save time and effort. The product also sends error and warning email notifications and reports via email. “Currently, the whole backup process of our entire infrastructure takes two hours. We perform backup on a daily basis. I like the level of detail that I receive in the email notifications, as detailed information is important to me,” says Andrea.

Recovery was a laborious and time-consuming process when the museum was relying on backup to tape. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, VM recovery couldn’t be easier. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication can recover entire VMs from deduplicated backups in a matter of minutes. The possibility of being able to recover a VM in dark times is priceless. Only those who’ve had to find themselves in unpleasant situations can understand that quick recovery is a total relief,” says Andrea.

Results

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides South Tyrol Museum of Archeology with reliable VM backup, detailed notifications and reports received via email, and improved VM recovery. The support team can be reached quickly and all issues or questions can be resolved professionally. VM recovery is now near-instant in comparison to the past approach, where recovery was a tedious process. “When we switched to NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the work of our IT team became smoother and easier. We definitely saved time on backup management as well. For now, I could not quantify the amount of money saved with NAKIVO Backup & Replication, and our peace of mind is priceless,” says Andrea.

About South Tyrol Museum of Archeology

The South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology belongs to the museums run by the Autonomous Province of Bozen-Bolzano, South Tyrol, Italy. Since its opening on March 28, 1998, the museum has been visited by over 5 million people. The museum is home to the preserved body of Ötzi, the Iceman. Designed in 1998 as a space featuring exhibits from the archaeology of the southern Alpine arc, Ötzi, and numerous topics associated with the Iceman can now be seen on three floors of the museum. For more information, visit www.iceman.it.