Polish MSP Safeguards Customer Data with NAKIVO

Business Challenge

HosTeam started in 2009 as a hosting provider with three co-located servers. Currently, the company has hundreds of servers with a network capacity of over 400Gbps. The company’s main services are virtualization and private cloud solutions. HosTeam offers Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere virtualization, as well as DDoS mitigation services.

HosTeam has two sites. The primary site in Warsaw has 300 physical servers and 1,000 virtual machines (VMs), and the secondary site stores all the backup copies of critical information. VMs store customer data that is mostly web services. There are several different environments, ranging from a small single server to as large as a few dozen servers. HosTeam provides virtualization services with storage and firewalls to their customers. Data integrity is critical for the company, as several customers from the banking industry have to report data loss to the government.

In the past, HosTeam relied on open-source tools and backup tools from their storage providers for data protection. The main issue was that backups required too much storage space and too much bandwidth. The previous tool only did a full backup and did not provide incremental backup. There were also random failed backup jobs, inconsistent backups, and failed recoveries. HosTeam needed a reliable VM backup solution that would provide incremental backups and consistent reporting.

Solution

NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers data protection for virtual, physical, cloud, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environments. The solution provides a wide range of functionalities, including installation on a NAS server, backup to tape, backup to cloud, granular recovery, disaster recovery orchestration, failover/failback, reporting, and much more. NAKIVO Backup & Replication also offers some of the most competitive pricing in the industry. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication offered us a variety of features at an affordable price. We tested other similar solutions and all were way too expensive for us,” says Bartosz Waszak, co-owner of HosTeam.

With the solution’s robust backup, HosTeam can create image-based, incremental, and app-aware backups of VMs. With VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology, only changes are copied to the backup repository, resulting in faster backups. “Most of our VMs are backed up on a daily basis, and few of our VMs are backed up twice a day. We have agreements with our customers that backups should be scheduled at fixed hours. Usually, all our backup jobs finish successfully within four to five hours. Incremental backups are much appreciated since now backups finish much faster. We enjoy direct access to storage, as well, so we can back up without overloading our ESXi servers,” says Bartosz.

“Instant VM recovery and instant granular recovery functionalities save a lot of time for HosTeam. Situations occur when customers need to recover only a single file, and we can do that in just a couple of minutes with instant file recovery. Sometimes, we have to boot a previous version of the database server to check some records in the database. Instant recovery is a big advantage, as previously we had to extract complete VM images, then boot, and copy files from the OS,” says Bartosz.

Results

“With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we have much more reliable backups. And with screenshot verification, we can test those backups anytime, to make sure that they are good and recoverable. With reporting, we receive cyclical reports to our email about the progress of our backups. Previously, we had to manually check that backups were done correctly, but with NAKIVO Backup & Replication, everything is now automated. Our senior administrators saved their time because the user-friendly web interface means they can offload recovering data for customers to helpdesk or junior administrators,” says Bartosz.

About HosTeam

HosTeam was established in Poland in 2009. Over the years, the company has been expanding and developing the range of services offered to their customers. HosTeam offers domain name services, hosting, virtualization services, and dedicated servers services, all with 24/7 support. HosTeam also provides switches, routers, and firewalls to their customers. For more information, visit hosteam.pl.