NAKIVO Saves Udens College Two Hours a Week on VM Backup

Udens College, a secondary high school in the Netherlands, saves two hours a week on VM backup and one hour for each granular recovery request, with NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed on a Synology NAS.

www.udenscollege.nl

Business Challenge

Udens College is a secondary high school in the Netherlands. The college has approximately 2800 students between the ages of 12-18 years old, and 400 employees. There are two physical locations, which are both targeted for a specific educational level. The college’s IT infrastructure runs on eight VMware ESXi hosts and around 80 virtual machines. The virtual machines store Windows file servers, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Active Directory, Windows Server 2019 and Debian. The college needs to protect its data reliably and securely in order to avoid deleting documents or emails problems. In case of more severe situations, like a fire or a server failure, all infrastructure must be recovered promptly with the help of a VM backup solution. If a VM backup solution is not able to recover their infrastructure, the college is at risk of closing their doors for at least a few months, which is certainly not an option.

Previously, Udens College protected their data with two approaches. They used VMware replication between both datacenters for the most critical VMs, and had a backup tool for backing up virtual machines and application data. However, the backup tool was never stable and reliable. Some days, the backup tool was completely operational, while on the others, it seemed nothing was working at all. The college often lost recovery points and the backup solution had slow support for the new VMware ESXi versions. Moreover, the installation and configuration process was also a tiresome job that took a few days of trial and error to sort. Basically, the college had little trust in their backup product. After some time, Udens College decided to move on from their backup product and search for a VM backup solution that would offer them speedy backup times, file and object level recovery, good support, and easy-to-use interface.

Solution

While on the hunt to acquire a new VM backup solution, Udens College realized that most products are hard to test and implement, while NAKIVO Backup & Replication is the easiest in terms of installation and configuration. During the initial trial period, the college naturally had questions for the support and their inquiries were always solved within a reasonable amount of time. The chat functionality that NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers is extremely helpful for new customers that have highly specific, nuanced questions.

“NAKIVO Backup & Replication is the easiest VM backup solution that we have tried. We were genuinely shocked at how easily the product works. The first VM was backed up within 10 minutes of when we began testing out the product. Currently, NAKIVO Backup & Replication is installed on two Synology boxes with 80 TB storage each. With that, we have a backup solution that is completely independent of our production network, which is a great advantage for us,” says Joey Aben, System and Network Administrator at Udens Colege.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides Udens College with application-aware backup and VM replication functionality. With VM replication, the college replicates critical VMs every 10 minutes and ensures disaster recoverability in just a few clicks. With application-aware backup, the college ensures that all data in their applications is consistent. “With application-aware backup, we were able to ensure the consistency of data in all our applications. All our VMs are backed up at least once a day. I enjoy the fact that there is no need to install agents. In order to back up 35TB of data, it took us approximately a day and a half to complete all the backup jobs. If we were to compare the backup times to our previous tool with NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the results would mean saving at least two hours every week for just the backup,” says Joey.

Udens College also takes advantage of other functionality, such as global data deduplication and file and object level recovery. “With global data deduplication, we were able to save at least 50% of our storage space. File and object lever recovery saves us a lot of time for recovery. The recovery of files, SQL objects, and Exchange emails is very straightforward and works as expected. We are also looking forward to Sharepoint recovery,” says Joey.

Results

NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed on a Synology NAS provides Udens College with improved backup speed, storage space savings, granular level recovery, and an easier installation and configuration process. Now, Udens College has trust in their VM backup solution as NAKIVO Backup & Replication has proved itself to be a reliable and powerful product. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication is the easiest VM backup solution to use; when other products have too many options and you do not know at which location you have to configure something. NAKIVO Backup & Replication is great and it works, just like that. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we save at least two hours every week on just the VM backup. Moreover, we save one hour for each restore request for a file or an object,” says Joey.

About Udens College

Udens College is a secondary school with a big network of schools abroad (SE, BE, DE, FR, ES, PT, SI, SL, RO, TR, IT, DK). Udens College is also an ELOS school, (Europe as a Learning Environment in Schools) promoting the European dimension in the normal curriculum. Bilateral student exchanges are the "core business" in international contacts. At the moment, there are three Comenius School Partnerships called CIVITAS, ECOLES and Europ'Art. For more information, please visit www.udenscollege.nl.