NAKIVO Saves an Italian Radio Station 8 Hours a Week on Backup Management
Business Challenge
Radio Radio is a radio station based in Rome, Italy. Radio Radio made its debut in 1978 and, thanks to its stable growth, is now one of most widely-listened to radio stations in central Italy. In the 80’s, Radio Radio was the first talk radio and the first station to use the RDS (Radio Data System). Today, after over forty years, Radio Radio is accessible from every form of media: web, applications, FM, and TV, providing top quality production and unencumbered free speech from its hosts, columnists, and commentators.
The station’s IT infrastructure consists of three physical servers that host seventeen virtual machines, providing all services necessary for Radio Radio to continue to function. All of the station’s virtual machines are hosted physically on two NAS devices. Data stored in the virtual machines can be divided into three types: office data, video data, and audio data. The VMs are used for a variety of purposes, but mostly they function as web servers, hosting sites, and assorted applications for the employees. As the radio station is live 24/7, reliable VM backup and quick VM recovery are of utmost importance for protecting the station’s data and getting quickly back online, should an error or an issue occur. Losing a single minute of streaming audio or video can impact the station severely in terms of being unable to reach their audience or broadcast advertisements. Overall, uninterrupted audio and video data access are critical to the station’s success.
In the past, Radio Radio protected their data by using a different backup software from another vendor. The product required complete involvement of their IT team and the amount of time spent managing and operating the software had become wholly unworkable. The station relied on a copy and paste policy to replicate VMs, which had proven itself an inefficient and unreliable approach. Additionality, the product did not offer the possibility for recovering entire virtual machines and files. “We needed automation, security, and basically a solution that could offer us complete functionality, including VM backup, VM replication, and VM recovery,” says Massimiliano Santolo, IT Manager at Radio Radio.
Solution
Radio Radio decided to select NAKIVO Backup & Replication due to the product’s ability to protect not only virtual, but physical environments as well, meaning that the radio can now not only back up their virtual machines, but also their physical servers. NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers seamless Windows Server Backup that allows to ensure data consistency of databases and applications. With VMware backup, the radio station can back up live VMs and all the application data. Moreover, NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides real time protection of the station’s data, as not only entire VMs can be recovered, but also individual files.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides the easiest installation and configuration on the market. “Everything is incredibly simple. I just downloaded the file with the Ubuntu release and created our first virtual machine. After some installation steps, I chose a password, and added NAS transporters and a vSphere instance. Installation on Ubuntu is best for us for now because we possess more control that way,” says Massimiliano.
Radio Radio takes full advantage of the product’s VM backup and VM replication functionality. Even though the initial full VM backup took a long time to complete, all subsequent backup jobs take from 30 to 60 minutes, depending on the day of the week. With forever-incremental backup, only changes get transferred to the backup repository, thus increasing the backup speed. VM replication enables the station to stay online while creating VM replicas on the secondary site. If an issue or a disaster occurs, the station can promptly power on those VM replicas and operate from their secondary site without any disruptions. “VM replication is a breeze. Easy to set up, fast to power on, if a VM has a problem,” says Massimiliano.
“I thoroughly enjoy NAKIVO Backup & Replication’s functionality, particularly the instant file recovery that allows me to manage user errors, while developing software or managing video/audio files. NAKIVO Backup & Replication has definitely resolved our problem with recovery, as we had no possibility to recover lost data at all before. Now, we can recover files and entire VMs quickly and reliably,” says Massimiliano.
Results
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides Radio Radio with backup of their physical servers and virtual machines, VM replication, and VM recovery. With forever-incremental backup, backup jobs are completed in 30 to 60 minutes on average every day. Regarding VM replication, the radio station can replicate their VMs to a remote location in a fast and reliable way. Lastly, Radio Radio is finally able to recover entire VMs and single files. “With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we’ve achieved automation and control of our backups’ quality. We also improved VM backup and VM recovery speed. We, as an IT team, save approximately 8 hours every week on backup management. NAKIVO Backup & Replication has also helped us get a good night’s sleep, too, just by knowing that everything is correctly saved every single night, without any errors,” says Massimiliano.
About Radio Radio
Radio Radio was founded in 1978 and thanks to its constant growth, Radio Radio has become among the top radio stations in central Italy, with one of the largest listener bases nationwide. Radio Radio is the proud to be called the Evolution of Radio. In the 80s, Radio Radio became Italy’s first talk radio station, and the first to adopt the text recognition and automatic choice of Radio Data System frequencies. Today, after more than forty years, Radio Radio is used on all multimedia platforms: web, APP, FM, TV, with the highest production quality and free expression from its hosts and commentators. Radio Radio has always been free and will forever be free. For more information, please visit www.radioradio.it .