Swiss School Kantonsschule Hohe Promenade Opts for Nakivo

Nakivo Inc. announced that the Kantonsschule Hohe Promenade (KSHP), a public middle school in Zurich, Switzerland, has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Established in 1875, KSHP has over 700 students and 120 teachers at the school. While the school focuses on ancient and modern languages, the course of study also provides in-depth training on mathematics, natural sciences, as well as education on arts and sports.

“Our single site is comprised of 40 servers: 20 physical servers and 20 ESXi hosts. VMware VMs mainly store web servers. Previously, we had only one web server that ran our website and we had all these dependencies that did not tie well together, so we decided to have a separate VM for each task. VMware VMs are essential because if a disaster strikes, the whole gymnasium administration might not be accessible,” says Kurt H., ICT administrator, KSHP. “I have tried several approaches to backup our VMware VMs. Firstly, I tried to save backups with a file-based backup solution, but the storage space increased dramatically because the backup size grew too fast, so this approach did not work. Secondly, I tried a script-based solution, but it was not reliable and I could perform only one backup at a time, so I decided to look for another solution.“

While looking for a replacement, Kurt came across Backup & Replication online.

“With Nakivo Backup & Replication, there is quite a large choice of deployment options, and Synology NAS being the best one. I was actually surprised that the product can be installed on my NAS, turning it into a VM backup appliance. The installation was quite easy and the product’s web interface is slick and clean. I was able to make use of the available hardware at the gymnasium, and also gained an all-in-one backup software, hardware, deduplication, compression and backups in one box,” he says.

Backup & Replication demonstrated higher VM backup speed and greater storage space savings.

“We use Nakivo Backup & Replication to perform backups every day and it usually takes around an hour to backup two clusters with three servers each. As for the data deduplication, I need less than 10% of the space to store my backups. Lastly, I tested instant VM recovery and this feature is lightning fast, so I am confident that I will be able to recover our environment without much hardship. In the future, I believe that the backup copy feature could become an important addition for KSHP, with its ability to maintain backup copies onsite, offsite, and in the cloud,” says Kurt.

By going with Backup & Replication installed on Synology NAS, KSHP was able to increase VM backup speed and save storage space 10:1, due to data deduplication and compression. With Backup & Replication, there is an additional level of data protection because automatic emails provide information on whether backup jobs have finished successfully.

“Past backup solutions did not provide automatic emails, so I had to manually check the storage to see if everything was there or not. Nakivo Backup & Replication is fast and requires little storage space,” says Kurt.