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Swiss Cloud Provider La Servizi Informatici Uses Nakivo Backup & Replication to Protect their VMware Environment

And to reduce DR testing time "by 90%"

Nakivo Inc. announced that La Servizi Informatici SA (LASI), a cloud service provider, has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Virtual infrastructure at LASI consists of approximately 200 VMware VMs.

Almost all of our mission critical services are virtualized,” says Marco Mirra, CEO, La Servizi Informatici SA. “Our VMs are running a wide range of services: Web sites, database servers, remote servers, dedicated appliances (including VoIP systems and surveillance systems), and digital signage.

All LASI services require constant and reliable data protection. Safeguarding infrastructure for high priority customers and providing a set of services for all customers is important to Marco.

Moreover, Marco has a lengthy list of requirements that a data protection solution should meet: “The ideal data protection solution should offer us a rich feature set coupled with a good price and a high level of support, and the most importantly, provide fast and frequent VM backups,” says Marco.

However, the previous VM backup solution used by LASI failed to meet these requirements.

As a key element of our DR process, we were spending over 20 hours a month manually testing the backups of our customer’s VMs to ensure they had recoverable VM backups in case of a disaster. We could have deployed an entire sand box environment for scripted testing of VM backups but the software and hardware infrastructure required would have been cost prohibitive. We needed a more cost effective VM backup solution that could not only automatically test our customer’s backups, but also do it without an additional hardware or software licenses from VMware, Microsoft, and the backup vendor,” says Marco.

The disadvantages of the previous VM data solution led Marco to search for a replacement. A rich feature set and fast VM backups were a priority for a backup solution. Moreover, a solution would have to be of a better price, so that not only costs will be minimized, but also data solution functionality will have to be more efficient.

In search for a VM backup solution, Marco referred to Avangate Italia Srl. – in data protection and security solutions distribution in Italy, and the Nakivo Gold Partner. Through a network of over 5,000 partners across the country, Avangate Italia offers solutions to international companies, public administration, SMEs, and IT professionals.

Following Avangate Italia’s recommendation, Marco tried Backup & Replication and was impressed with the simplicity and speed of deployment and overall ease of use that the product provided.

In comparison to the past and other evaluated products, Nakivo proved to be simpler and faster,” he says. “Nakivo clearly freed up time and resources for our multiple tasks.

Since manually testing our customer’s VM backups was tedious and time consuming, we wanted automatic testing and verification of our customer’s VM backups and that became possible with Nakivo’s screenshot verification feature,” says Marco. “With screenshot verification, we were able to reduce the time for DR testing from more than 20 hours a month to less than 1 hour, without additional hardware and software requirements. With Nakivo Backup & Replication, we are sure that each VM backup is verified because screenshots of test-recovered VMs are sent as proof of recoverability.

After each job run, Backup & Replication creates a recovery point in the backup repository. Once a VM backup is completed, it recovers the VM from the recovery point, disables networking on the VM to prevent network connections, and makes a screenshot of the OS. After that the report with the screenshot is sent via email.

In addition, Backup & Replication has introduced installation on Synology NAS and this allowed Marco to improve VM backup performance even more.

The new direct NAS installation feature allowed us to take advantage of an existing Synology NAS to be used natively for VM backups, freeing up host resources, and unifying all VM data protection components in a single system,” says Marco.

Overall, after a long testing period, Backup & Replication met Marco’s lengthy list of requirements and has fulfilled all his needs and even exceeded expectations.

Thanks to Nakivo’s quick setup, good performance, effectiveness when used for recovery, good reporting, and scheduled operations before and after jobs, all our needs and requirements are completely satisfied,” says Marco. “We are very excited about the product; the results and the new opportunities offered by quick update process in Nakivo Backup & Replication is really impressive. Our datacenters are now backed up in a very efficient and easy to manage manner.

Backup & Replication is used to protect VMware environment at LASI and has demonstrated results in installation, configuration, usage, and performance.

The possibility to connect more than one network interface to a single virtual appliance and split jobs, as well as create a high-performance VM backup appliance with Synology NAS, has already improved our VMware VMs performance substantially,” says Marco.

However, the greatest result was in reducing time of the DR process.

With Nakivo and screenshot verification feature, we saved 90% of time that was previously spent on manual testing of our customer’s VM backups. Now, we can postpone hiring additional IT resource to just cover DR testing, as our cloud business continues to expand,” says Marco.

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