NAKIVO Slashes VM Backup Time for an Information Security Company

Business Challenge

Traxion is the independent information security specialist and Benelux market leader in identity and access management. Traxion looks through its clients’ eyes from a strategic, tactical, and operational perspective, on the basis of which the company develops the best solution, from advice and design (consultancy), to implementation (system integration) and management (services). Traxion’s multiple specialists are part of multiple type of successful consultancy and implementation projects in the area of risks, security and GPDR governance and audits towards operational security management like Security and GDPR Awareness, Penetration testing, Privileged Account Management, encryption and certificates, data security and Identity and Access Management in a wide range of organizations. On top of that we are able to deliver support in those areas to realize care free services for the customer. To deliver all above-mentioned services Traxion uses 75 VMware VMs, for which availability confidentiality and integrity are highly important.

Traxion has two sites, one in the Netherlands and one in Belgium. Their IT infrastructure consists of six physical servers and approximately 75 VMware VMs. VMware VMs are multiple test, development, and production servers that are critical to the company’s day-to-day operations. Without a proper VM backup solution that provides fast VM backup and recovery, Traxion cannot guarantee SLAs fulfillment to their customers. If Traxion cannot restore critical data or applications, the company could lose internal data, and would thus lose the trust of their customers.

Previously, Traxion relied on an agent-based backup product. “Our previous solution was a pain because agent based backups took a very long time, plus any failed backup jobs had to be rerun from the start, thus consuming further extra time, which was not always easy to find during normal business hours. Since the product performed server centric backups, we ended up with at least 80 backup jobs, thus the solution had an enormous impact on manageability and backup administration. Moreover, we also experienced trouble trying to recover VMs. What I truly lacked from the previous product was having agentless backups and doing granular recovery directly from the VM backups,” says Erik Voerman, System Engineer at Traxion.

Solution

Traxion chose NAKIVO Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment due to the product’s simplicity, high backup performance, and recovery functionality. Erik’s first experience with the whole installation process was merely positive, as the process was straightforward, without any extra special steps along the way. “I appreciate the fact that NAKIVO Backup & Replication is an agentless and easy to use product. Installing NAKIVO Backup & Replication was a joy, as within minutes the whole setup was done, and just few minutes later, the first backup job was already running. The web user interface does the job well and is responsive,” explains Erik.

With the previous backup solution, after every update, Erik had to update the agent on the virtual machines. However, NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers completely agentless backup of VMware VMs. “Because we no longer need the backup agents anymore, we went from 28 hours to just 7 hours for the full backup of our entire infrastructure. Now, with NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we perform the full VM backup on Fridays, while we do the forever-incremental backups on all the other days. In the past, this was simply not possible because of the time that it took us to deal with agents. Basically, by switching to NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we improved VM backup performance by at least 4X, as well as we no longer have to deal with failed backup jobs,” says Erik.

With the previous solution, Traxion not only experienced problems with VM backup, but VM recovery was often problematic because significant time was required to restore a whole VM. Moreover, the previous backup product did not offer file recovery. NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers Traxion both instant VM recovery and instant file recovery. “We often had troubles with recovering the whole VMs and we missed file recovery. Now, with NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we have both features. Once in a while, we test instant VM recovery and instant file recovery and the functionality works great, without any errors, as it should be. Moreover, NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides not only instant file recovery, but also instant object recovery for Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory without any extra cost,” reports Erik.

Results

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides Traxion with agentless, fast, and forever-incremental VM backup, as well as instant VM recovery and instant granular recovery. By switching to NAKIVO Backup & Replication, Traxion improved their VM backup performance by 4X and eliminated the recurrence of failed backup jobs. With the product’s recovery capabilities, Traxion can now recover whole VMware VMs, files, and Active Directory objects. Moreover, NAKIVO Backup & Replication turned out to be 3X more cost-efficient for Traxion in comparison to their past backup solution. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication saved us money and time, as well as helped us achieve hassle free and fast VM backups. NAKIVO Backup & Replication saved us about ½ of a working day a week that was previously spent on redoing failed backup jobs. No more failed backup jobs for us, plus the VM backup performance improved dramatically. I believe that NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a great VM backup solution because of its simplicity, performance, and functionality,” says Erik.

About Traxion

Traxion is a unique and independent information security specialist. With their strategic, tactical, and operational consultancy and services, Traxion works together with their customers towards robust and flexible security solutions. Traxion aims to make security manageable and provide security advisory. Traxion builds security solutions and delivers security services, everything from penetration testing to PKI, from access control to audit, from identity management to internet of things security. Moreover, Traxion delivers security management and GDPR/AVG consultancy services. For more information, please visit www.traxion.com.