Bulgarian Cloud Provider Host Ventura Group Chooses Nakivo

Nakivo Inc., a virtualization data protection software provider, announced that Host Ventura Group, a cloud services provider in Europe, has selected its Backup & Replication Pro Cloud Provider Edition to protect mission-critical client VMs.

Host Ventura is an ISO/IEC 27001:2005 hosting and cloud services provider based in Sofia, Bulgaria, with regional operating centers based in Germany, UK, and Belgium. The company is led by a team of business-driven PRINCEII, ITIL, VMware and Microsoft certified (vExpert, VCDX) experts with a wealth of experience in the IT sector. The Host Ventura backup and DR services are now powered by Naviko.

Business Challenge
Host Ventura protects more than 80 VMs running business-critical applications as well as Postgress and SQL databases.

“Our previous VMware backup and replication product was inefficient and consumed both our time and our customers’ time,” said Tom Arentsen, a VMware certified design expert and the IT director, Host Ventura. “First, our previous solution had a complex user interface, so it took us about eight hours on average to teach each new cloud customer. We needed a more intuitive user interface that could be learned by our new customers in 15 minutes or less. Second, the performance and reliability of backup and replication jobs had to be better to reduce the amount of time required to troubleshoot client problems. Finally, the TCO with our previous solution grew each year, causing us to disappoint our customers by passing the costs along to them. We needed a simple VM-based rental model that would be stable for us and our customers over time.“

Solution
Host Ventura is a growing cloud services business, and while 80 VMs are protected by Nakivo, it expects to protect thousands of VMs in the future. Since continuing to endure price increases and growing IT time allocations for customer training and problem resolution was impacting their cloud services business.

Arentsen decided to investigate other possible options: “We evaluated the leading VM data protection offerings available on the market. In our evaluation, Nakivo Backup & Replication came out on top with the highest VM backup performance and job completion reliability, while providing a much more intuitive user interface and all this at a lower overall price point.“

Nakivo Backup & Replication delivered on Host Ventura’s requirements for better performance, along with better pricing, and reduced IT time for training and trouble shooting. The product supports backing up VMs within vCloud Director and can process multiple VMs at the same time due to its multi-threaded architecture.

“Also critical for us is the ability to backup VMs within vCloud Director,” said Arentsen. “We liked Nakivo’s support for vCloud Director as well as the modern, web 2.0 interface that has reduced our new customer training time from 8 hours to just 15 minutes.“

Additionally, Host Ventura has gained the ability to extend their cloud service offering with backup to public clouds.

Results
With Nakivo Backup & Replication, Host Ventura can offer more competitive prices to their SMB customers and higher margins utilizing Nakivo’s monthly VM-based rental pricing. VM backup and replication time has been reduced by 30%, along with greater reduction in time spent on VM job troubleshooting.