Charlotte Radiology Selects Nakivo Software and Synology NAS

Nakivo Inc. announced that Charlotte Radiology, a radiology group practice, has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Founded in 1967, Charlotte Radiology is one of the largest and most progressive radiology groups in the US. In addition to offering 24/7 coverage for 14 hospitals, it also owns and operates 13 breast centers, 3 mobile mammography units, 3 vein centers, a cosmetic center, and several vascular and interventional clinics.

With 19 different locations, Charlotte’s Radiology IT infrastructure is primarily virtualized and consists of 10 ESXi hosts.

“VMware VMs store standard file servers, application servers, SQL and Exchange, and the Radiology Information System. The Radiology Information System is the main application that drives our patient centers because without this application we cannot provide proper services to our patients, as it contains medical records, insurance, and personal information,” says Tony Maynard, manager IT, Charlotte Radiology.

“The previous VM backup solution supported our needs at first, but at the same time was not intuitive because it required several steps and processes to get to know how the product operates. Due to the product’s complexity, it came to the point that only two people in our department were able to perform backups and restores. In addition, we were limited by the amount of the capacity that we were able to backup. The biggest issue was that we paid for 100% of the product, but could only backup 80% of the capacity,” says Maynard.

While searching for a replacement, he was looking for an easy-to-use VM backup solution that would have no capacity limitations and was able to integrate well with a cloud.

“We wanted a more streamlined solution, where anybody in our department could schedule backup jobs without any problems. Furthermore, we wanted a solution that would support all the newest VMware releases and have a professional support in place,” says Maynard. “Nakivo Backup & Replication not only met our initial requirements, but we were pleasantly surprised that we needed no training sessions to use the product. I really enjoy the fact that once we installed Nakivo Backup & Replication on Synology NAS, we just log into the interface and start the work.“

Charlotte Radiology selected the Synology NAS installation because it unifies all VM data protection components in one box, without the need to maintain additional hardware.

“With Synology NAS, there is no need to add a 3rd party software to get it synchronized to the cloud, no Windows overhead, no worries about patching with the latest Microsoft update, no worrying about the HDD going bad in RAID-5. Nakivo Backup & Replication on Synology NAS provides a super intuitive interface, additional storage space, and easy integration with Amazon cloud,” says Maynard. “With Nakivo Backup & Replication, we perform VM backups six days a week and backup our file servers every three hours. The scheduling process is really intuitive because you have different options and you do not have to try to figure it out and note it all down. Backup jobs take roughly minutes to complete and there are no limitations on the amount of backup jobs to schedule at one time,” says Tony.

“In terms of speed, Synology NAS boosts the performance nearly 2X. With the previous VM backup solution, we were backing up roughly 13TB of data every night and with Nakivo Backup & Replication, we now backup only 5TB because of data deduplication and compression, so this is huge savings in terms of space and performance,” added Maynard.

Backup & Replication installed on Synology NAS, provides Charlotte Radiology with a 2x VM backup speed increase and VM storage space saving of nearly 50%. The group can now backup an unlimited amount of data and copy VM backups to the cloud.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication provides us with ultimate speed, performance, and granularity, and eliminates the need to purchase any add-ons for cloud integration. Previously, we were licensed to a certain amount we could backup, but now Nakivo Backup & Replication removed that barrier and allows us to backup everything in the entire organization,” says Maynard.