Town Office of Raymond, ME, Backups VMs “12X Faster” With Nakivo

Nakivo Inc. announced that the Town Office of Raymond, ME has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Raymond is a town in Maine, US, with a population of approximately 4,000 residents. The Town Office of Raymond is in charge of promoting community resources, schools, recycling, utilities, post offices, library, and a local business directory. It consists of several departments, including animal control, GIS, code enforcement, public safety, and public works.

Woodbrey Consulting, Inc. is currently managing the IT infrastructure of the Town Office of Raymond. With a virtual environment consisting of two ESXi hosts, VMware VMs store data like file and print servers, DNS, FTP, DHCP, web servers, email servers, GIS servers, phone systems with VoIP, as well as municipal software that holds financial information. All public services must be available for residents and visitors to have access to the necessary information regarding schools, housing, public safety, or public works. If the IT infrastructure cannot be backed up and recovered quickly, public services might not be delivered in a timely manner.

“The IT infrastructure at the Town Office of Raymond was protected by a different VM backup solution, but the process of scheduling jobs was complicated, and the user interface was not intuitive. Since backup and recovery was difficult and their pricing was becoming exorbitant, we had no choice but to look for a new VM backup solution that would better support our public services. The Town Office of Raymond required a product that offers high backup performance, forever-incremental backup, convenient scheduling of jobs, and the ability to copy backups offsite including the cloud,” says Kevin Woodbrey, CEO, Woodbrey Consulting.

By performing a Google search, Woodbrey discovered Backup & Replication and trialed the product on another client’s environment. After testing the product for some time, he noticed stable and reliable performance, intuitive web interface, and flexibility in scheduling backup jobs. After he decided to switch to Backup & Replication, the software was installed to protect the virtual environment at the Town Office of Raymond.

“When we selected a pre-configured virtual appliance, in a couple of clicks, we were able to install the product, connect to the network, browse the web interface, and even schedule the first backup job. Nakivo Backup & Replication is the easiest product that I have ever installed. The product works exactly as advertised and with excellent instructions, nothing can be missed,” says Woodbrey.

By switching to Backup & Replication, the Town Office of Raymond improved its VM backup performance and achieved forever-incremental backup. Backup jobs are scheduled to run at night, after the Town Office of Raymond shuts down, and backups are saved to a NAS server.

“Obviously, an initial full backup takes some time, but after that, with VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) enabled, the product is just backing up incremental changes. For the first time, it took an hour to backup 500GB of data. With CBT, VM backups finish 12x faster on average and the quickest backup jobs takes to complete, while the longest take under five minutes,” says Woodbrey.

The Town Office of Raymond also keeps backup copies offsite, to prevent accidental loss of backups. Having an extra copy of backups offsite, allows not to worry about recoverability, in case something happens to the primary backups.

“To safeguard our primary backups, Nakivo backup copy job enables us to easily send and keep backup copies offsite, in case a disaster happens,” says Woodbrey.

Nakivo protects the VMware environment of the Town Office of Raymond and enables them to improve VM backup speed and achieve forever-incremental backup. With CBT, VM backups are 12x faster on average and backup jobs finish in under five minutes. With backup copy, the municipality can keep extra copies of backups offsite for DR.

“The biggest saving for the Town Office of Raymond is that the backup window is definitely shorter now with Nakivo Backup & Replication, in comparison to the previous solution. Moreover, since we are a small municipality and every penny counts, switching to Nakivo Backup & Replication with its features was the most cost-effective decision. The clean and intuitive web interface makes managing and scheduling backups much easier. My top three things that I like in Nakivo Backup & Replication are the web interface, forever-incremental backup, and backup copy,” says Woodbrey.