African ISP Afrihost Deploying Nakivo Backup & Replication

Nakivo Inc. announced that Afrihost (Pty) Ltd. – one of the largest ISPs in Africa – has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Founded in 2000, Afrihost provides Internet solutions, hosting, and domain services in South Africa. Over the years, Afrihost grew to be one of the top 3 ADSL service providers in the country. The company has won the MyBroadBand ISP of the Year award three times in 2011, 2012, and 2013.

Afrihost leverages two high-end VMware virtualized datacenters with blade servers running VMware ESXis in their infrastructure. The company has 1000s of their own and customer VMs, which run a variety of OSs, applications, and databases, including Windows, Linux, IIS, Apache, Exchange, Active Directory, SharePoint, Oracle, SQL, MySQL, VoIP and file servers.

The solution that Afrihost previously used to protect VMs had a number of disadvantages: licensing and maintenance costs were prohibitively high to protect the entire infrastructure, the product lacked appropriate APIs to automate VM backup and replication, and had a complex Windows-based interface. As a result, the IT team at Afrihost started looking for an alternative solution.

“Our goal was to improve VM data protection levels for our own and customer VMs and reduce related costs at the same time,” said Brendan Armstrong, CTO, Afrihost.

The IT team at Afrihost has evaluated the VM backup and replication solutions available on the market including Nakivo Backup & Replication, which came up as the leader. The product has performed well in the vSphere lab test environment across all tests, delivering high performance VM backup and replication. In addition, it has provided support for Linux, modular architecture, an intuitive web interface, and affordable pricing.

“We also liked the flexibility of Nakivo in terms of feature development. During the POC, we requested that the product supports datastore clusters and provides APIs required to automate VM data protection. Both features were implemented by Nakivo in the next dot release,” said Brendan.

All VMs at Afrihost now protected by Backup & Replication.
VM backup and replication are automated at Afrihost: using Nakivo APIs, new VMs are automatically added to appropriate backup/replication jobs, and decommissioned VMs are automatically removed from appropriate jobs. This has simplified the VM lifecycle process and reduced the time previously spent on VM data protection. The automation of data protection processes, combined with a lower cost licensing and maintenance has provided Afrihost with significant savings.

“Nakivo provided us with over 600% savings on our VM protection and backup platform, whilst delivering higher performance backup and replication that is simple, robust, and scalable. Afrihost prides itself in providing customers with leading products and services underpinned with exceptional support at an affordable cost, it is therefore key that our technology partners offer innovative solutions that embrace our ethos,” said Brendan.

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