NAKIVO Boosts VM Backup Speed by 4X and Improves VM Backup Reliability for an Environmental Firm

Business Challenge

MSE Group is an environmental, engineering, geology, construction and health and safety company with a focus on providing exceptional service to private, industrial, municipal and federal government clients. The company’s portfolio encompasses more than $1 billion in contract capacity and 500 customers nationwide. Clients, partners, and employees of the company benefit from their thorough work ethic and sincere passion for what they do.

With multiple offices across the United States, the IT infrastructure of MSE Group relies on VMware. The VMs store Windows servers and databases, as well as a variety of documents, videos, pictures, drawings, and files. MSE Group cannot afford to lose information; business-critical data loss could cost the company millions of dollars and innumerable man-hours. That is why a VM backup solution is needed to protect the company’s virtual environment and provide VM recovery and offsite backup, in case any kind of disaster were to strike.

“We had problems with our previous VM backup solution: first off, the backup speed was so slow that every single incremental backup took several hours. But most importantly, the product did not provide any type of VM backup verification, so we had no idea if our data would be recoverable in the end. We learned this the hard way when one of our VM backups became corrupted; we had to rebuild everything from an earlier backup, and that took way too long. Our business-critical services were running in a reduced capacity for over three days. After such an awful experience, we decided to abandon that product and started looking for replacement software that would provide us with reliability and a balanced price/functionality ratio,” says Jacob Crisafulli, IT Manager at MSE Group.

Solution

MSE Group investigated the VM backup software market and tested several products. NAKIVO Backup & Replication became the company’s choice because of the software’s functionality and price point. NAKIVO Backup & Replication was then deployed as a pre-configured VMware virtual appliance and imported into VMware vSphere. “While I personally did not install and configure NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the feedback that I got from MSE’s IT Specialist was that the whole process was effortless. The pre-configured virtual appliance was extremely easy to set up, and it took him only an hour to configure the product and initiate the first backup job,” says Jacob.

Using the VMware VM backup feature, MSE Group currently backs up their VMs twice daily; jobs are scheduled for the afternoon and later on during the night. “The initial full VM backup took approximately 10 to 12 hours, which is expected, as we have several terabytes of data. Now, with forever-incremental backup, we only must do the increments, and the time they take ranges from five minutes to two hours, with the average backup job finishing within 30 minutes. What our previous solution would have taken us at least two hours to back up, we can finish in roughly 30 minutes with NAKIVO Backup & Replication,” says Jacob.

MSE Group copies their backups to offsite locations to ensure their data is protected even if the primary backups are compromised by unexpected events. “We use backup copy not even primarily for software or hardware failures, but essentially to protect us against any types of physical or natural disasters. Basically, having an extra copy of backups is essential to make sure that our data can always be recovered,” says Jacob. Another feature that provides MSE Group with an extra assurance of recoverability is screenshot verification. “With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we can automatically verify VM backups. It is exciting to know that we have good backups and that VMs can be recovered from these. Screenshot verification would have prevented that situation where a corrupted VM backup caught us off guard and we experienced several days of reduced capacities,” says Jacob.

Lastly, Jacob appreciates the network acceleration feature because of its ability to save network bandwidth. “With our old software, VM backup jobs took longer to finish, while with NAKIVO Backup & Replication the backup speed is awesome and network load is minimized at the same time. Now, a lot less data is going offsite due to network acceleration,” says Jacob.

Results

NAKIVO Backup & Replication deployed as a pre-configured VMware virtual appliance provides MSE Group with improved VM backup performance, offsite backup capabilities, and a near-instant way to verify their backups. The company increased VM backup speed by 4X with network acceleration and forever-incremental backup, compared to their previous VM backup solution. In addition, MSE Group can now rest assured that their backups are recoverable. “What we like about NAKIVO Backup & Replication is the speed, network acceleration, screenshot verification, and the deduplication and compression, which helped us save storage space. We also appreciate the backup administration time savings of at least 50% on monitoring and managing the backup jobs. Overall, we have much more faith in NAKIVO Backup & Replication due to significant time savings and better backup reliability,” says Jacob.

About MSE Group

MSE Group, LLC provides highly qualified and competitive environmental, engineering, safety, and health services to public and private entities nationwide. The firm is an SBA-certified 8(a), EDWOSB, and DBE business with additional state and local small business and minority certifications throughout Texas, Florida, and the southeastern United States. The multi- disciplinary capabilities and service offerings of MSE Group strategically position the company to compete as a prime contractor both nationally and internationally. Their portfolio now encompasses over $1 billion in contract capacity and more than 500 federal and non-federal customers nationwide. For more information, please visit msegroup.com.