What are you looking for ?
Infinidat
Articles_top

Switchfly Adopted Nakivo Backup & Replication

To protect VMware environment

Nakivo Inc. announced that Switchfly Inc., a technology company that powers travel shopping and loyalty redemption solutions for brands across airlines, hotels, financial services and ecommerce, has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Switchfly

Switchfly delivers products via a flexible software-as-a-service platform, which lets clients launch and maintain a complete omni-channel travel shopping and loyalty point redemption experience superior to any online travel agency. Tailored to their client needs while maintaining a brand match, Switchfly solutions drive customer engagement, enhance brand loyalty, and increase profit.

Founded in 2003 and headquartered in San Francisco, the company generates more than $1.25 billion in revenue for its clients annually and facilitates the redemption of more than 35 billion reward points and miles annually. The company’s client roster includes American Airlines, Emirates, JetBlue, LAN Airlines, Norwegian Air Shuttle, and TAM Airlines; American Express Loyalty Edge, IAG Avios, Lufthansa Miles & More, and United MileagePlus; InterContinental Hotels Group, Marriott and Starwood Hotels; Expedia, Orbitz and Priceline; American Express, Groupon and PayPal.

Across all environments, Switchfly runs 30 ESXi hosts with 300 VMware VMs with various OSs. The majority of the VMs facilitate inventory requests for travel destinations, hotels, car rentals, etc. and information pertaining to customer bookings of those items.

We strive for the best possible uptime for our VMware VMs to keep commerce flowing for our clients,” says Eric Prescott, senior systems administrator, Switchfly. “If we are down, and not able to recover quickly, our customers would suffer revenue loss during that time.

Switchfly has used several data protection solutions in the past.

First, we would manually download VM files from VMware and used those to archive important VMs,” says Prescott. “While looking for a more automated and effective solution, we tried vSphere Data Protection and also a third-party VM backup product.

Manual downloading of .vmdk files was cumbersome and inefficient. vSphere Data Protection seemed to be a fair solution, especially for a free product, but its shortcomings were soon clear.

Backups were slow and we had multiple instances across multiple rebuilds of VDP where it would become corrupt and all previous backups would be lost. The third-party solution was the most full featured, but the price point was too high,” says Prescott.

Eric has started evaluating available VM backup solutions and came across Nakivo Backup & Replication. The product has performed great in production for over a year now, meeting the company’s data protection and recovery needs.

Nakivo Backup & Replication has offered us reliability, speed, and flexibility for a fraction of the cost of other paid solutions,” says Prescott.

To reduce storage requirements for VM backups, Backup & Replication uses data deduplication and compression. The product saves only unique data blocks to the backup repository and compresses them to further reduce data size.

On a product to product basis, we are noticing much better results with Nakivo compression and deduplication,” says Prescott. “We are able to have a deeper retention policy and have more backups with the same amount of storage by using Nakivo over our previous VM backup solution.

He also appreciates Nakivo’s ability to protect entire VMware containers.

While it may seem small, I really treasure the feature that allows us to backup an entire cluster rather than adding individual VMs to a backup job,” he says. “This eliminates the human factor of having to remember to add newly created VMs to the product. It is easy to imagine a scenario where we need to restore a machine from backup, log in to initiate the restore, only to notice that we never added that machine. At that point we are just losing out on time and resources.

Nakivo ensures that when we have a need to restore a VM, that we have reliable and worry free backups waiting for us, and offer more point in time options than previous solutions that we have used,” says Prescott. “Flexibility is key when making sure that the business-critical data is safe and Nakivo delivers the flexibility that we need while saving us 50% on our VMware VM backup costs. By choosing Nakivo over their previous VM backup solution Switchfly had more than a 50% savings based on a core to core licensing comparison.

Articles_bottom
AIC
ATTO
OPEN-E