Nakivo Enables VM Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service for Armstrong Labs

Nakivo Inc., a virtualization and cloud backup software company for VMware environments, announced that Armstrong Labs has selected Nakivo Backup & Replication to deliver VMware VM Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service for their customers.

Armstrong Labs is a cloud and IT services provider based in Perth, Western Australia. The company specializes in VMware server backup and DR, wireless solutions for remote and metro areas, Telstra 3G deployment in fringe areas, and hotspot wireless internet services. With over 15 years of IT experience, the firms has designed and built many types of custom data protection and network solutions for deployments in Western Australia.

Armstrong Labs provides a complete set of managed services around VMware VM backup, replication, scheduled testing, and DR for the SMB segment. The company aims to bring advanced BC features to be within reach of businesses that traditionally don’t have the budget that would normally be required for this level of disaster preparedness.

Armstrong Labs also provides design, configuration, and management services for point-to-point wireless, WiFi mesh, and 3G Internet connections. These technologies enable the companys to provide a reliable coverage over large physically separated areas so that their customers stay connected to the network or Internet in and between outlying buildings. The firm also provides the ability to connect IT networks, security, and telephony systems together all on the same network.

Armstrong Labs delivers tailored solutions to meet customer requirements, and actively monitors wireless networks and backups systems for better manageability, fault management, and reporting. Its systems, self-service options, privacy assurance, and commitment to efficient data restoration mean that their customers have the peace of mind that their data is protected.

Armstrong Labs runs their multi-tenant cloud backup infrastructure within datacenters located in Perth, Western Australia. The company protects data of organizations in the health and engineering industries, and is looking to expand their offering to cater to other industry types through 2015-2016. Armstrong Labs’ customers run a variety of workloads including email messaging, file servers, various Line-Of-Business applications, and deployments of VDI.

Most of the Armstrong Labs’ customers have previously backed up the very minimum required information to tape, portable disk, or an onsite NAS with nothing stored offsite. This approach didn’t protect entire VMs and was unreliable since most customers have never fully tested a restore scenario. Armstrong Labs’ goal was to provide a managed VMware backup solution for their clients with scheduled full restore testing at the company’s data center.

“Our customers require comprehensive backup solutions to mitigate hardware failures and tolerate extended downtime,” says Andrew Armstrong, owner, Armstrong Labs. “One of our current customers had a major hardware failure and no usable backup resulting in extended downtime (3 days) prior to being managed by Armstrong Labs. This was very costly and embarrassing to their business.“

“We have evaluated several products and found that Nakivo Backup & Replication simply has the right mix of features, pricing, and usability for both us and our clients,” says Armstrong. “Support was also very responsive when we reported a small issue during setup, we were very happy about the assistance provided.“

Backup & Replication provides a rich feature set, including forever incremental VM backup and replication, support for applications and databases, global data deduplication, network acceleration, instant VM, file, and application objects recovery. The product provides multi-tenancy and self-service options out of the box, enabling cloud provides to introduce BaaS and DRaaS.

“Nakivo provides a great feature set, listens to their customers, is well priced, and suits our Managed Backup Platform due to providing a Multi-Tenant console out of the box. Backups are of whole VM’s making restore and portability a breeze,” said Armstrong.

“Nakivo slots in very nicely to our portfolio of services; as a managed backup services provider, it delivers an efficient and comprehensive backup solution at a price point that puts advanced features within easy reach of the SMB market segment,” he added. “Nakivo is equally suitable for very large deployments which provide us with a plenty of growth capability in future without having to change products at a later date.“

Using Backup & replication, Armstrong Labs provides a DRaaS solution for their clients with scheduled full restore testing at their Perth data center. Recently, one customers was infected with a variant of the Crypto-Locker virus, which did extensive damage to the customer data, and Armstrong Labs had them operational again within 2 hours. With Backup & Replication, Armstrong Labs is able to provide data protection and BC features, which are not normally available to the SMB market segment, while customers can have a peace of mind that Nakivo and Armstrong Labs are providing them a reliable and regularly tested recovery solution.