California School District Performed Data Center Migration With Nakivo “Within Minutes”

Nakivo Inc. has announced that San Dieguito Union High School District (SDUHSD) has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

The San Dieguito Union High School District, in Encinitas, CA, is one of the nation’s finest school districts, offering a wealth of academic and extracurricular opportunities in which its students can engage and excel. Spanning 85 square miles, the district includes four high schools, five middle schools, and a continuation high school. The SDUHSD serves 7^th through 12^th grade students from the coastal North San Diego County and its surrounding communities.

The IT infrastructure at SDUHSD consists of 20 ESXi hosts spread out across 13 different sites, and approximately 160 VMware VMs.

“VMware VMs run various workloads, including Microsoft Active Directory, SQL, Oracle, SIS, user home directories, file servers, web servers, AD, DNS, DHCP, LMS, as well as store critical student information systems, and financial information,” says Matthew Colwell, network technician, SDUHSD. “Data protection is an absolute must have for our organization because user errors, deleted files, ransomware, and malicious activities, all pose significant threat to achieving 24/7 availability of data and applications.“

“With our previous backup solution, we experienced constant failed backup jobs and the backup speed was just unacceptable. From time to time, the software would also leave behind VMware snapshots that would fill up the storage space. Overall, I had to spend approximately 8 hours a week on monitoring and maintaining the solution,” says Colwell.

SDUHSD came across Backup & Replication on a forum and decided to give it a try.

“In terms of installation, I performed the basic setup in less than one hour. By choosing the pre-configured virtual appliance option, we probably saved at least 3 hours on initial deployment across all sites. At first, I thought that I would not like the web interface, however, it’s fast and responsive, and we’re able to open the administrative interface from any computer, without installing a bulky client,” says Colwell.

“VM backup is the backbone of the product, and it is fast – what used to take a day, takes a few hours. I also like that I can schedule a backup job for 20-30 VMs, in comparison to the previous solution, that could not even backup one VM after another,” says Colwell. “Furthermore, we now maintain an offsite backup copy of our environment, so, we’ll be able to recover even if something happens to our primary backups. Backup copy was extremely simple to set up and I like how it is easy to define a separate retention policy for data that is maintained offsite.“

VM replication enabled SDUHSD to perform datacenter migration.

“During the same time that we bought Nakivo Backup & Replication, we were moving from one datacenter to another one, approximately 5 miles away. Prior to the move, we used the software to replicate critical VMs (one VM was 2TB) from the old site to the new site. Nakivo Backup & Replication performed the initial replication and continued to replicate daily changes each night, up until the day of the move. The end result was downtime that took a few minutes, rather than hours or days,” says Colwell.

“With Nakivo Backup & Replication, VM backups are fast and consistent, while backup copy jobs give us an extra level of data protection. With the previous backup tool, we could not perform VM replication, but with Nakivo Backup & Replication, we used it to migrate VMs from one datacenter to another, with minimal downtime. While the previous solution required constant monitoring and controlling, we easily saved 32 hours per month on backup administration. And in terms of backup costs, Nakivo Backup & Replication saves us approximately $18,000 annually versus the previous solution,” says Colwell.