Nakivo Helped German Hosting Provider Phi Medien Systeme to Save €25,000

Nakivo Inc. announced that phi Medien Systeme GmbH, a hosting and cloud services provider headquartered in Jülich, Germany, has selected its Backup & Replication to backup and recover VMware VMs with Flash VM Boot, while also saving €25,000 in backup costs.

phi Medien Systeme specializes in hosting services for business applications, including networking and secure OS services, for SMBs. In addition, they provides datacenter solutions, software programming, data protection solutions, and digital living technology home automation.

The IT infrastructure consists of a main site with 10 ESXi hosts and 200 VMware VMs and a DR site. Since the company hosts customer’s data, the content and applications that are stored in the VMs are defined primarily by the customers themselves. Some customers store infrastructure services, like firewall systems, others store shared services, databases, web application servers, as well as terminal servers. The company’s main business goal is to provide the most reliable and efficient service to its customers, by managing and protecting their VMs and services, as well as ensuring data integrity.

“Our previous VM backup solution became way too expensive for us to continue managing. The product had multiple features that most of our VMs did not necessarily need, however, we still had to purchase expensive licenses to cover all our sockets. We needed a reliable VMware backup and recovery solution that would offer different deployment options, provide ease of use and visibility, and deliver fast VM backup and recovery speed,” says Jan Stockem, IT systems engineer, phi Medien Systeme.

The company evaluated several VM backup solutions, but selected Nakivo for its flexibility, performance, features, and affordable price.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication provides different choices in terms of installation and this is a big plus. First, we tried installing the product on our Synology NAS RS3614RP+ and then on Windows server 2012 R2, both options were easy and straightforward. While using the direct SAN access, we receive the best performance while backing up and restoring VMware VMs and remove the load from our production networks,” says Stockem.

With Nakivo, phi Medien Systeme delivers Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) to customers with VMware environments. The company needs to maintain a high backup and recovery success rate because, if backup and recovery jobs would fail, customers would not be satisfied and SLAs can be affected. Nakivo’s VMware VM backup improves backup reliability and increases VMware backup performance.

“Generally, we are backing up all 200 VMware VMs once a day with 28 days of retention. With Nakivo Backup & Replication, we are able to backup with a speed of 400MB/s and it usually takes less than an hour to successfully complete all 200 VMs, with Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology enabled,” says Stockem.

With Flash VM Boot, phi Medien Systeme can recover entire VMs from backups near-instantly and avoid downtime and data loss.

“If a VM becomes corrupted, we are able to restore our critical business services near-instantly without any disruptions to the business operations. If a customer accidentally deleted an application, we just need to choose a backup and a recovery point and push a button to boot that VM in just a few minutes,” says Stockem.

With Backup & Replication’s multitenancy, phi Medien Systeme can deliver BaaS and DR-as-a-Service for VMware environments and manage multiple tenants in a single pane of glass.

“We enjoy the fact that we are able to manage customer’s VMs from our datacenter and provide them with reliable data protection. With an access to a self-service portal, our customers can create and schedule backup jobs and restore their own files or entire VMs without our help thus offloading us from these tasks,” says Stockem.

Backup & Replication delivers reliable data protection for phi Medien Systeme and 24/7 availability of customer data. Due to fast VM backup and CBT, 200 VMs are backed up every day in under an hour. Instant VM recovery ensures recoverability of VMs near-instantly, so that critical business services are not affected.

“The fact that we do not need any agents or additional software to administrate backups is a big advantage and if coupled with an affordable price and ease of use, makes Nakivo Backup & Replication a great VM backup solution. If to compare to our previous solution, by selecting Backup & Replication we were able to save €25,000 in backup costs and that is fantastic,” says Stockem.