The Oxford Partnership Decreased Storage Space by 75% With Nakivo

Nakivo Inc. announced that The Oxford Partnership (TOP), a partnership of three colleges in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

The Oxford Partnership brings together three education and training providers in Activate Learning Oxford, GEMS Education Solutions, and Moulton College. In addition, this partnership has established four women’s colleges in the North of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – namely, Al Jouf Sakaka, Arar and Al Qurayyat, and Al-Madinah.

The IT infrastructure at TOP is comprised of four sites that are located across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and each site has a local IT environment for both students and teachers.

“Each site has a vSphere cluster with two to three ESXi hosts and an iSCSI SAN. Each site is connected using MPLS to allow collaboration and sharing of data,” says Rizwan Majeed, head of IT infrastructure, TOP.

Each site at TOP follows a standard configuration model, providing the following services to the local users: directory services, file services, print services, as well as System Center Configuration Manager for machine configuration and package deployment.

“VM backup and recovery are extremely important to our organization because thousands of students rely on our IT infrastructure for learning and safe keeping of data and files. We experience challenging conditions, especially in the remote territories, where power is less stable, so having a stable VM backup and recovery solution is of the utmost importance,” says Majeed.

The previous method of data protection at TOP was basically non-existent.

“Previously, our students just relied on USB drives to store their data, and it was only a matter of time before a catastrophic loss would have happened. Our strategic IT partner, Cutter Group, has encouraged us to virtualize our infrastructure within each college, to allow students and staff to roam between locations if necessary. A key requirement was to ensure that a robust VM backup solution was in place,” says Majeed.

Cutter Group (Cutter Project Limited) recommended Backup & Replication as a possible VM backup solution for TOP.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication installed as a pre-configured virtual appliance is an excellent deployment method for our smaller sites, allowing for consistent and high performance deployments. This method of deployment is a huge time saver because we simply import and configure Nakivo Backup & Replication within a few hours of hitting the ground. In addition, not having to install a console or an application to integrate with the product, allows multiple administrators to have a view of the system,” says Majeed.

“In terms of VM backup, our backup jobs finish within a few hours each evening and we have scheduled screenshot verification and space reclaim during the weekends. We save a significant amount of time in managing and controlling backup jobs, as each new VM deployed within the VMware infrastructure is already incorporated into Nakivo Backup & Replication,” says Majeed.

“We particularly like the global data deduplication feature, which allows us to make huge disk space savings. We are seeing storage space reduction of 75% within each Nakivo Backup & Replication deployment. This is excellent as it allows us to increase the number of our retention points without sacrificing much more space,” says Majeed.

TOP has also been able to improve VM recovery.

“We have extensively tested the Instant VM recovery feature. Waiting for full VM restores across a LAN is still an extremely slow process, when users are demanding access to the systems. In our tests, Instant VM recovery was able to reduce this window and deliver the restored services to users much faster. We have been fortunate to not need to recover the entire VMs in the production and only used this feature for DR testing and we are able to see impressive performance from Nakivo Backup & Replication,” says Majeed.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication provides a simple, yet powerful VM backup solution that is fully equipped to solve various backup and recovery challenges. Convincing users to store their data in a centralized way was a cultural shift to what they were used to with a previous data protection method. Once convinced, we observed a huge increase on data demands and Nakivo Backup & Replication easily scaled to meet this requirement. With Nakivo Backup & Replication, we can now confidently restore and support our users with their ever-increasing data demands,” says Majeed.