SoftNAS Selected Nakivo Backup & Replication

Nakivo Inc. has announced that SoftNAS, LLC has selected Backup & Replication to protect their VMware, Inc.‘ environment.

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SoftNAS is an 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, SoftNAS. “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 backup mission-critical VMs to cloud for DR.

“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 Braddy.

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 backup 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 Braddy.

Backup & Replication has been designed to 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 Braddy. “Backup administration via Web interface is easier to access and works fast.“

Backup & Replication provides built-in backup to 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 Braddy. “After the setup was complete, we were able to backup our VMware environment directly to the cloud and we can now perform recoveries at any time and from anywhere.“

To save storage space, 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, 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.

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 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 Backup & Replication.

SoftNAS is using Backup & Replication to protect their virtualized environment both locally and to the cloud. Backup & Replication enables SoftNAS to backup their mission-critical VMs to Amazon Cloud for DR.

“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 Braddy. For operational recovery, SoftNAS is using replication.

“VMware replication is entirely transparent with Nakivo,” says Braddy. “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.“

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 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.“