Software Provider abas France Implements Nakivo Backup & Replication

Nakivo, Inc., a virtualization and cloud backup software company for VMware environments, announced that ABAS PGI France SAS, a part of abas Software AG, Karlsruhe Germany, has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

abas is a group of locally-operated companies that sell and support the abas ERP software suite. The company has 35 years of experience delivering flexible ERP solutions for SMBs. The company employs more than 1,000 experts at 65 sites located in 29 countries around the world.

abas is trusted around the world. Sometimes called ‘the best ERP system you’ve never heard of’ they stay out of the spotlight, but they’re a company full of people who are passionate about helping mid-sized businesses grow into industry leaders. abas does this by focusing their resources on R&D and product quality, and seeking to understand and respond to the needs and processes of customers. More than 3,500 companies use abas ERP to run their businesses, 350 of which have been using the software for more than 15 years. abas is also very proud that they have a 92% customer loyalty rate.

abas France is the abas ERP software partner serving customers across France. It works with business to bring their corporate process to best practices with productivity and efficiency. It brings a combination of next generation technology, industry expertise, structured methodology, and collaboration to create a process, which reduces risk and optimizes the business process.

All business-critical servers at abas France are virtualized. VMware VMs run telephony, asterisk, VPN, remote desktop, file, and other servers. Most of the VMs, though, run lots of abas ERP servers, both ones used for internal development and testing, as well as those dedicated for abas France customers.

Previously, backups were created manually for each VM by launching a manual OVA export from the vSphere Client, then moving the OVA file to an external drive to store it. This approach was cumbersome and time-consuming. The main disadvantages were the need to stop the VMs to do the backup, and the long time it took to finish the backups. This had to change.

“We needed to ensure full-time availability of our internal servers and have capacity to provide our services 24/7 without data loss in case of a disaster,” says Stéphane Coulon, senior ERP consultant, abas France. He is also in charge of all internal IT infrastructure.

he has started researching available backup solutions for VMware environments. His goal was to set up an automated VM backup both locally and offsite, while also maintaining VM replicas of mission-critical VMs, which would enable near-instant DR for their VMs.

Backup & Replication is built for virtualization and certified by VMware. As an all-in-one solution, the product provides the ability to backup live VMware VMs both locally and offsite, as well as create and maintain VM replicas – identical copies of source VMs. Notably, VM replicas created by the product are regular VMware VMs, which are visible in the vSphere Client and can be powered on at any time even without Backup & Replication.

“With Nakivo Backup & Replication I need far less time to ensure that we have a backup for every VM. We can also automatically store some VM backups offsite, and replicate the most critical VMs for DR,” says Coulon. “I receive a report after each backup and replication, and a daily report for all jobs. So it takes just a quick look to know that everything is OK.“

Backup & Replication also provides a set of granular recovery capabilities. VM files and application objects can be instantly viewed and recovered right in the product interface. The data is read from compressed and deduplicated VM backups, without recovering the full VM. All features work out of the box and do not require installing agents or creating a special type of a backup.

“The feature set provided by Nakivo Backup & Replication has perfectly fitted our needs. Also, License price is very affordable compared to competition,” said Coulon.

“Using Nakivo Backup & Replication we make local backups for all our VM daily, as well as backup the most important VMs offsite on the weekly basis,” says Coulon. “We also maintain VM replicas for some of the VMs for DR purposes. In case of a disaster, mission-critical VMs can be powered on enabling near-instant DR. I can estimate that we gained up to 3 work days per month by using Nakivo Backup & Replication. And we could add the inestimable time and money saved in case a disaster strikes, as we can now restore our services in just a few clicks, allowing every employee to work normally.“