Established in 2001, The Centre for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling (CSCAMM) at the University of Maryland aims at fostering excellence in Applied Mathematics. The main mission of CSCAMM is to support and stimulate the research activities using Applied Mathematics as the main analysis, simulation, and computational tools. To help build a thriving community, CSCAMM supports interdisciplinary research through a strong visitor’s program, regular organization of international events, and contributes to graduate education in the partnership with the AMSC program.
“Since the main mission of CSCAMM is research, we have accumulated a vast amount of information over the years. Our environment is a mix of Windows and Linux, our VMware VMs run Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory, web servers, as well as store user files,” says Andrew Arensburger, IT Manager at CSCAMM, the University of Maryland.
For CSCAMM, VM backup is the basis of successful daily operations because faculty, staff, students, and visitors require 24×7 access to research materials, workshops, and courses located on the website. “Steady and fast VM backups are the core component of our data protection strategy. For us, losing accumulated research data, as well as personal details about faculty, staff, and students is highly undesirable,” says Andrew.
“I joined CSCAMM at the University of Maryland four months ago and inherited NAKIVO Backup & Replication from my predecessor, so my main goal was to get to know the product as fast as possible. NAKIVO Backup & Replication is deployed on a standalone machine that is separate from our production hosts. The main advantage is that it is independent and backs up itself along with other VMware VMs. In case we lose the physical machine, we will still have the backup, so we can install a new version of NAKIVO Backup & Replication and then get everything from that backup in minutes,” says Andrew.
Andrew’s first impression of NAKIVO Backup & Replication was that the software does its job well. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication is simple and intuitive, it took me a little time to learn how to use it, and I didn’t have to read manuals. NAKIVO Backup & Replication integrates well with VMware and has a user-friendly web interface that is easy to manage,” says Andrew.
At CSCAMM, NAKIVO Backup & Replication performs VM backups once a day. “It takes under one hour to back up our entire infrastructure, so VM backup is quite fast. All backup jobs are incremental and this approach significantly reduces backup time and network load,” says Andrew. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, VM backups can be created on demand or on schedule and can be stored onsite, offsite, as well as in a cloud.
“I have tested instant file recovery and recovered a couple of files in less than a minute! In a potential disaster situation, this feature would save us days of work,” says Andrew. “Another useful feature is Backup Copy, which allows replicating backups to a secondary repository that can be located onsite, offsite, or in a cloud. With two copies of backups, I could have extra security and peace of mind, in case of a disaster.”
NAKIVO Backup & Replication protects a VMware environment at CSCAMM every day. “The entire infrastructure is backed up in under one hour. If a potential disaster strikes, we would have the ability to instantly restore files and applications from the VMs in minutes, rather than go through a complete VM restoration procedure,” says Andrew. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a steady product that does its job without constant monitoring and controlling. Basically, NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides me a peace of mind,” says Andrew.
The Centre for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling (CSCAMM) is a mathematics institute that was created in 2001 by the University of Maryland, College Park (UMd), as a major impact project which aimed to address the challenges offered by scientific developments. CSCAMM encourages cross-fertilization of research activity that lies at the interface between different scientific fields utilizing scientific computation and mathematical modeling. The primary goal is to foster research and educational activities that highlight novel computational algorithms and mathematical modelling and their interplay with physical science, biological science, and engineering. CSCAMM involves UMd scientists together with world renowned scholars for whom computation is an essential part of their research program. In addition, CSCAMM maintains an active visitors program and helps organize workshops and conferences in mathematics and its applications. For more information, visit www.cscamm.umd.edu.
SoftNAS Inc. is the leading provider of software-defined NAS solutions and protects business-critical data for customers using any combination of public, private, and hybrid clouds. Virtual infrastructure at SoftNAS consists of 16 VMware ESXi hosts and 105 VMs. “We run our R&D lab on VMware,” says Rick Braddy, Founder and CEO/CTO of SoftNAS, Inc. “This includes VMs for software development, Quality Assurance, build machine, as well infrastructure VMs, such as Windows domain controller, vCenter, remote desktop jump boxes, and our storage server.”
As a part of their data protection strategy, SoftNAS decided to back up mission-critical VMs to cloud for disaster recovery. “The ability to keep our VMware backups in Amazon Cloud – which is secure, reliable, and cost-effective – would give us a piece of mind and enable us to recover our VMs in case of a disaster,” says Rick. However, their existing VMware backup solution did not provide built-in cloud backup and restore capabilities. On top of that, the solution had a number of other issues. VM backup deduplication worked only at the job level, which means that data was deduplicated only for backups of a single job. For SoftNAS, the choice was either to back up all VMs by one job with the same schedule and options or have separate jobs (as business needs suggested) but lose storage space due to duplicate data in the backup repository. In addition, overly complex interface lead to time-consuming VM backup configuration and maintenance, which had to be done via an RDP session to a backup machine. “The downsides of our existing VMware backup solution combined with a high yearly maintenance cost made us start looking for an alternative,” says Rick.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication has been designed to seamlessly plug into VMware environment and provides a simple and intuitive web interface. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication was far easier to set up and configure compared to our previous VMware backup solution,” says Rick. “Backup administration via Web interface is easier to access and works fast.”
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides built-in backup to the cloud that comes at no cost. Backup to Amazon Cloud has been designed to be very simple: “All we had to do is type in Amazon Cloud credentials, enter the required amount of space for backups, and click a single button – NAKIVO Backup & Replication has automatically created a new backup repository for us in the cloud,” says Rick. “After the setup was complete, we were able to back up our VMware environment directly to the cloud and we can now perform recoveries at any time and from anywhere.”
To save storage space, NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides global data deduplication for VMware VM backups. The product automatically deduplicates VM backups at the block level and ensures that only unique data is saved in the backup repository. All VM backups are deduplicated across entire backup repository – regardless of how many backup jobs have been created, NAKIVO Backup & Replication checks each new data block for duplicates across entire backup repository. After data is deduplicated, the product automatically compresses each block of data so it occupies even less storage space in a backup repository. Both data deduplication and compression features are built-in, enabled by default, work out of the box, and come at no cost.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides near-instant operational recovery via VMware VM replication, which creates and maintains identical copies of source VMs on target ESXi hosts. VM copies – called replicas – are regular VMware VMs that are available in VMware vSphere. VM replicas remain in the powered off state and do not consume any resources, yet they can be simply powered on, for near-instant recovery. In addition, up to 30 recovery points can be saved for each VM replica. Each recovery point is a regular VMware VM snapshot, so if a source VM has been damaged, replicas can be easily rolled back to a previous good state even without NAKIVO Backup & Replication.
SoftNAS is now using NAKIVO Backup & Replication to protect their virtualized environment both locally and to the cloud. NAKIVO Backup & Replication enables SoftNAS to back up their mission-critical VMs to Amazon Cloud for disaster recovery. “I have a peace of mind knowing that even if a disaster strikes, our business-critical data is always recoverable from an offsite backup in Amazon Cloud,” says Rick. For operational recovery, SoftNAS is using replication. “VMware replication is entirely transparent with NAKIVO,” says Rick. “Should we lose an important VM or even an entire ESXi server, we can near-instantly go back online by powering on VM replicas in the vSphere client even without using NAKIVO Backup & Replication.”
NAKIVO Backup & Replication has also provided SoftNAS with storage savings. Due to global data deduplication and compression, which work across entire backup repository, SoftNAS has saved 25% of storage space for VM backups vs. their previous data protection solution.
SoftNAS has upgraded to NAKIVO Backup & Replication for less than the cost of yearly maintenance for their previous VMware backup solution. “With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we have saved more than 50% vs. maintenance of our previous VM backup solution, and have additionally saved 25% more in storage space costs with better deduplication, lowering our backup expenses by 75% overall.”
SoftNAS®, Inc. is the leading provider of software-defined NAS solutions and protects mission-critical data for customers using any combination of public, private and hybrid clouds. SoftNAS gives its customers the enterprise-class data security, protection, and performance required to safely, predictably, and reliably operate IT systems and applications. SoftNAS believes in powerful, hassle-free data management and works with any hardware, any data type, across any geography, and with any IT environment, including the most popular public, private, and hybrid cloud computing platforms: Amazon® AWS™, Microsoft® Azure™, CenturyLink Cloud®, VMware vSphere® and service providers. SoftNAS is #1 best-selling NAS filer in the cloud, and the winner of multiple awards, including Red Herring Top 100 Award 2015 and Datacentre ICT Cloud Storage Product of the Year. For more information, refer to www.buurst.com.