Nakivo Backup & Replication Selected by Czech Republic Manufacturer Doosan Škoda Power Company

Nakivo Inc. announced that Doosan Škoda Power has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Doosan Škoda Power is a global manufacturer and supplier of high performance steam turbines and related devices for the power industry. The company dates back to 1904, when Doosan Škoda Power’s antecedent produced the first 412kW steam turbine. Since 1904 there has been a rapid expansion of the company’s turbine production, stimulated by growing worldwide demand for electricity.

Doosan Škoda Power is a company which products belong to the best available on the global market. It has been manufacturing steam turbines for over 100 years, and all of the production experience gained over this period of time is incorporated into the design of their new products.

Doosan Škoda Power is a supplier of steam turbines from 10MW to 1,200MW. Through ongoing R&D, the company constantly refines their products and drives innovation. It offers efficiency combined with reliability and operational flexibility, and all that at a reasonable price.

Their R&D program, supported by increased funding every year, guarantees continuous improvement and future innovations. The company constructs advanced scientific systems and processes while seeking the most effective and efficient way of working. This enables the company to establish a firm foundation on which people and business can grow together.

IT infrastructure at Doosan Škoda Power relies on VMware-based infrastructure to host their business-critical systems. The VMs store end user data and perform various functions, serving as ERP servers, PLM file servers, print servers, and so on.

In the past, the VMs were protected manually by creating a copy of the powered off VM files. This approach had a number of disadvantages: backup of VMs was slow, it could be done only when VMs were offline, and backups could be easily missed. In case of a data loss or a disaster, recovery could take hours or even days of work.

“We had to improve our VMware data protection strategy and establish an automated way to safeguard our virtual infrastructure and backup all user data,” says Roman Sobota, engineer, IT infrastructure, Doosan Škoda Power. “Because if some data or a whole VMs was lost, it would affect our business in a big way.”

Sobota has set out to investigate VMware VM backup, replication, and recovery solutions available on the market.

After looking for available VM backup products Sobota came across Backup & Replication: “We have created a small test VMware environment and tried VM backup and restore using Nakivo,” he says. “It installed very quickly, had a simple user interface, and created a VM backup very fast.“

Backup & Replication allows using the ‘set it and forget it’ approach: after creation, VM backup and replication jobs run automatically on a schedule without any intervention and job results are sent via email to specified email addresses.

Most of all, Roman appreciates the storage space reduction capabilities of Backup & Replication. The product provides built-in data deduplication which works at the block level across entire backup repository. This means that only unique data blocks are saved in the backup repository while duplicates are discarded and a reference to available blocks is made. On top of that, the unique data blocks are compressed to further reduce the backup size and the compression level can be adjusted to optimize either for faster backups or for a smaller backup size.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication has been great for us: it is very fast and easy to use, it automates the entire VM backup process, which saves me hours of work every day, it saves storage space with deduplication and compression, and – most of all – it does not break our budget. And should I need to recover something, it’s just a few clicks away,”  said Sobota.

Doosan Škoda Power leverages Backup & Replication to protect and recover their business-critical VMware VMs. Compared to their previous VM backup approach, the company spends 11X less time on VMware VM backup maintenance.

“Now we have safe backups of all our VMs without any business impact,” says Roman. “And compared to alternative solutions available on the market, we have saved 52% on licensing and maintenance costs.“

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