San Francisco Public Defender’s Office Reduces VM Backup Costs With Nakivo

Nakivo Inc., announced that San Francisco Public Defender’s Office has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

For over 90 years, the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office has provided legal representation to people in San Francisco. Led by Jeff Adachi, California’s only publicly elected Public Defender, the office provides legal representation to over 25,000 people each year.

The office has received numerous awards for its services. The American Bar Association has selected the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office for its 2015 Hodson Award for Public Service. The Hodson Award recognizes the outstanding service and extraordinary accomplishment by a government or public sector law office.

The mission of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office is to protect and defend the rights of indigent clients through effective, vigorous, compassionate, and creative legal advocacy. It strives to provide the highest level of legal advocacy for each of their clients, and to be a nationwide model for the delivery of indigent defense services.

Virtual infrastructure at San Francisco Public Defender’s Office consists of 15 ESXi hosts and approximately 100 VMware VMs. “We have virtualized all our mission-critical systems,” says Rene Manzo, senior information systems engineer, San Francisco Public Defender’s Office. “While our VMs run some regular infrastructure servers such as DNS, Active Directory, and Exchange, they also host sensitive information, such as client privileged data, court data from the judicial system, permanent data access, and paperless (electronic) file access.“

This valuable data and these systems require regular and reliable protection. Equally important is the ability to recover files, application objects, and entire VMware VMs from the backups. However, the previous VM backup solution used in San Francisco Public Defender’s Office was not up to the task.

“The installation, configuration, and maintenance of our previous solution was complex and not intuitive,” says Rene. “The big problem, though, was that many of our backup jobs were failing regularly. To make things worse, opening a support request online has never worked, and when we eventually managed to get support. This was a frustrating experience.“

The disadvantages of their VM backup solution led Rene to search for a replacement. Reliability and quick recovery were the absolute requirements for any new backup product. And it would have to fit the bill too: “As a government organization, we are cost sensitive. Ideally, we’d want to reduce the licensing and maintenance costs while not sacrificing, better yet, improving the backup and recovery functionality,” says Rene.

In search for a replacement to their faulty backup product, Rene came across Backup & Replication and was impressed with the simplicity of deployment and configuration.

“I downloaded their pre-configured Virtual Appliance, so there was no need to deploy an additional Windows server,” he says. “The appliance was very easy to install, Web UI configuration was simple, intuitive, and powerful.“

After a deployment and initial configuration Rene started testing Backup & Replication. “Nakivo extended my trial of their full version software several times. I had plenty of time to test the software, ensure that it’s reliable, and work with our staff,” he says.

Nakivo Backup & Replication met Rene’s requirements and passed the lengthy test: “It was easy to create jobs (backup, VM restore, file restore), backups were good, backup repository maintenance tools were great and unique (enabling to reclaim unused space and run self-diagnostics and healing),” says Rene.

Rene was impressed with the Nakivo technical support: “A support bundle can be generated and mailed from the product UI, which automatically creates a ticket. Support was present all the time during the trial period and very proactive in resolving our environmental issues. They provided assistance in timely manner, which was a relief compared to our previous situation.”

“Nakivo also provides regular product updates, such as support for the latest versions of vSphere, NFS storage support, and Amazon cloud support, keeping up with industry standards,” says Rene. “Another reason I like Nakivo is that they will pick up their phone and call me directly to make sure that everything is OK and working fine. Their customer support is superior to anything I’ve seen in the industry.“

Backup & Replication is used to protect VMware environment at San Francisco Public Defender’s Office.

“I am very happy with my switch. I really like working with Nakivo,” says Rene. “Nakivo Backup & Replication is RELIABLE! It has simplified my daily job, as backups are now successful saving me a lot of time and headache. The performance is very good too and very stable.”

Rene was also able to save their VM data protection budget.

“For the cost of one year with our previous backup solution I was able to afford 3 years with Nakivo and I am spending  much, much less time worrying about my backups,” he admits.