Unknown US Large Networking Company Selects Nakivo and iXsystems TrueNAS for Data Protection

Nakivo Inc. announced that a large networking company has selected its Backup & Replication and TrueNAS to protect its VMware environment.

A well-known large networking company, headquartered in the US, needed achieve 24/7 availability of critical IT systems within the data centers, so that if the data and applications are not available, there is still a way to restore VMware VMs. The company could not contemplate having critical IT systems offline, because many customers would be adversely affected.

“Previously, we were not able to perform full and incremental VM backups because our homegrown system with asynchronous replication and snapshots allowed us to only backup the files inside the VMs and that limited our data protection obligations. We had to start looking for a VM backup solution that would match our requirements in cost, performance, and simplicity, as well as guarantee 24/7 availability of ours and our customers’ data and IT systems,” says Doug C., senior network engineer.

Backup & Replication is a fast, reliable, and affordable VM backup solution for VMware, Hyper-V, and AWS EC2 environments. It offers features that increase VM backup performance, improve reliability, speed up recovery, and help reduce TCO.

TrueNAS is an enterprise-ready storage appliance developed by iXsystems, Inc. that guarantees data integrity and has complete redundancy throughout the storage array. TrueNAS is based on open Source storage solution FreeNAS.

While switching to Backup & Replication, the organization wanted to keep both Rsync backups and Backup & Replication backups, so storage space became a pressing issue. The networking company decided to craft their own VM backup solution by using Backup & Replication on FreeNAS servers and TrueNAS storage appliances.

“We have established a multi-tier data protection strategy that works well for us. VMware VMs running on top of VSAN handle the first level of failures, while replica VMs that are stored on the TrueNAS are a second tier of protection. In addition, we perform full VM backup with Nakivo Backup & Replication running on top of the TrueNAS appliances and FreeNAS servers. Lastly, we use backup copy jobs to send backups offsite,” says Doug C.

Backup & Replication allows the networking company to simultaneously run backup jobs in different datacenters, and backup all of the VM servers at once. Using the VM replication feature, the organization can power on the VM replicas for near-instant DR. With Nakivo’s backup copy, the company can maintain copies of its backups between datacenters for an extra layer of protection.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication and TrueNAS integrate well together. Nakivo Backup & Replication has native support for NFS mounts and we can also make an NFS mount on the TrueNAS and get things working pretty fast. Both products are straightforward, operate cohesively with each other, and produce high VM backup performance results,” says Doug C.

The primary goal for using  Backup & Replication with TrueNAS appliances and FreeNAS servers was to achieve 24/7 availability by securing enough storage space on the dedicated hardware for VM backup and VM replication. On average, the networking company is seeing a reduction of 85% in storage space use with Backup & Replication bundled with TrueNAS and FreeNAS servers.

“We use both compression and deduplication on TrueNAS and the storage space savings are usually pretty high; on average, we see an 85% reduction in storage space,” says Doug C.

Backup & Replication with TrueNAS deliver results for the networking company by providing 24/7 availability of data and critical IT systems, as well as providing a VM backup storage space savings of 85%. The networking company utilizes a TrueNAS system at all three of their main data centers to hold replica VMs, while the FreeNAS certified servers are used as backup boxes.

“We are happy that TrueNAS and FreeNAS servers operate so well with Nakivo Backup & Replication and how they complement each other with a great price/performance ratio. With the help of Nakivo Backup & Replication, and iXsystems, we now have onsite backups, offsite backups, and VM replicas. Both TrueNAS and Nakivo Backup & Replication are valuable components to our successful daily operations,” says Doug C.