Grace Christian School Boosts VM Backup Performance “by 2.5X” With Nakivo

Nakivo, Inc. announced that GRACE Christian School has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

GRACE Christian School is a private school located in Raleigh, NC. It comprises of elementary, middle, and high school programs. For the 2017-2018 academic year, the school has 781 students enrolled. The school’s academic, fine arts, athletic, and social programs are designed to challenge and inspire students to develop their talents.

GRACE’s IT infrastructure consists of three locations across the campus. Their VMs run Microsoft active directory servers, Windows servers, a computer management system, network monitoring servers, and other data as well as applications, including special software designed for schools to monitor staff and student activity. The IT infrastructure at GRACE relies on authentication services working and running properly. If a server fails, the students and teachers can lose access to vital information. Since the school does not want to lose connectivity, or to deal with the consequences thereof, a VM backup solution is required to protect their virtual environment.

“Previously, we used a script solution to protect our VMware environment, but the system was clunky and cumbersome, while also required extra man hours to get things working properly. The whole VM backup process was laborious and could take six to ten hours to accomplish. In addition, I would actually need to be physically present on campus, connected to the network, throughout the entire VM recovery process. That posed a huge risk to the organization because if something were to happen, and I was unavailable for whatever reason, the entire IT infrastructure would take a hit. Ultimately, we decided to look for a proper VM backup solution designed to protect VMware environments, and our main criteria were ease of use, price point, as well as integration with Synology NAS servers,” says Dana Morrison, technology director, GRACE.

While looking for a VM backup solution within the Synology Application Center, Morrison noticed Backup & Replication, and after researching Nakivo, her interest was piqued. Installing Backup & Replication on a Synology NAS server is easy and intuitive; coupled with a clean web interface, it makes the software user-friendly.

“What I like about Synology NAS as a VM backup appliance is that we are able to use the servers for different things, like storage of surveillance footage, for example, while at the same time using them to backup and recover VMware VMs with Nakivo Backup & Replication. We managed to not only save money, but also achieve flexibility and combine backup software with our hardware in one single device,” explains Dana.

With Backup & Replication, GRACE can backup and recover VMs faster in comparison to the school’s previous solution. It provides a Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) retention scheme, which allows the school to save storage space while keeping recovery points from any period in time.

“We keep recovery points on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. What is great about the retention scheme is that the recovery time is extremely fast with any recovery point you chose to recover from. I tried to recover a core server with Nakivo Backup & Replication and the whole process was phenomenally fast – only 20 minutes or so,” says Morrison.

“In terms of VM backup, if to compare to the previous script solution, we managed to improve performance by 2.5X at least. Backing up our biggest server (which holds 3TB of data) takes approximately 4 hours with Nakivo Backup & Replication, whereas before, the script solution would have taken something like 10 hours. Such an improvement is fantastic,” says Morrison.

She also takes advantage of the automatic reports and email notifications, offering visibility into the health of VMs, thus issues can be noticed and resolved before they are able to impact the organization.

“Email notifications are great for alarming us of any inconsistencies within the backup or recovery jobs, and we really appreciate the automatic reports we receive after each backup job completion, as well as the digest at the end of the week,” Morrison reports.

Backup & Replication installed on Synology NAS provides GRACE with fast VM backup and recovery, as well as reporting and monitoring capabilities. The school increased their VM backup performance to more than double the speeds that they achieved with their previous script solution. The school can also recover critical servers within 20 minutes.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication helped me save two hours a week that I used to spend poring over scripts to make sure things were running properly. Now, I spend no more than 15 minutes a week with the product, thus I have more time to spend on other important IT-related activities. Overall, Nakivo Backup & Replication helped us gain visibility into our virtual environment with automation and reporting, while also helped us increase our VM backup and recovery performance,” says Morrison.