Onit Chooses Nakivo and Asustor

Nakivo Inc. announces that Onit, Inc., an American cloud software provider, selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Founded in 2011, Onit is a cloud software provider that creates solutions to transform best practices into more productive workflows, better processes, and operational efficiencies. Onit deploys Onit Apps to simplify business process automation and improve business productivity across all industries; primarily working with legal, compliance, sales, IT, HR, and finance departments.

Headquartered in Houston, TX, Onit has several sites across the US, Europe, and Asia. The company’s IT infrastructure consists of 12 physical servers running approximately 300 VMware VMs. The virtual environment is almost entirely based on Linux servers that run a combination of databases, web applications, as well as search, job automation, and utility servers.

With a customer base and employees located across several different time zones, Onit cannot afford any downtime or data loss. The company’s employees need to communicate with customers on a daily basis; therefore, losing even one business day would be costly and troublesome for them. It is for this reason that the company requires a robust VM backup solution for data protection.

“Formerly, our internal network servers were protected by rsync at the file level. Restoring from rsync was a laborious and time-consuming process. The program also lacked the ability to restore entire VMs. For an environment with a large number of VMs, we really needed software that was specifically created to protect virtual environments. As we do not have the resources to babysit every single process, reliability and ease of use were extremely important for us. In the end, that’s why we chose Nakivo Backup & Replication – because of the software’s functionality and pricing structure, which kills the competition,” said Steven Brown, IT and compliance manager, Onit.

Brown was already acquainted with Backup & Replication; from using it in the past, he was aware that the software was easy to set up, manage, and maintain. Onit purchased Backup & Replication to protect servers that provide controlled production access, data sanitization, quality assurance, and development environments.

The company installed the software on an Asustor AS6208T NAS in order to create a reliable and energy-efficient VM backup appliance for their virtual environment. Such a VM backup appliance combines software, hardware, and storage into a single device. The major advantages of this combination are that there is no need to purchase a separate server to run VM backups, and that hypervisor resources are not consumed.

With Backup & Replication, Onit can take advantage of several features, including VM backup, VM replication, and backup copy. With VM backup, it is able to increase VM backup speed with VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) and save storage space with data deduplication.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication allows us to backup approximately 10TB of data, and we generally keep recovery points on a daily and weekly basis. Cumulatively, the whole backup process takes a couple hours every night, while separate backups on the weekends take approximately six to eight hours. With data deduplication and compression, we also managed to decrease the storage space consumed by 60%, thus we can backup VMs more often while retaining information for longer periods of time,” says Brown.

With VM replication, Onit creates and maintains identical copies of source VMs on target ESXi hosts. In the case of a setback, VM replicas can be powered on and then powered off once the virtual infrastructure is restored. Therefore, the risks of data loss and downtime are minimized with VM replication. Additionally, Onit maintains backup copies offsite, as an extra layer of security to allow them to fulfill business recovery objectives.

Backup & Replication installed on Asustor NAS provides Onit with the ability to backup and replicate VMs and keep backup copies offsite. With data deduplication and compression, Onit was able to save 60% of its VM storage space. The Asustor NAS installation option has eliminated the need to purchase separate servers to run VM backups.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication is one of the most intuitive and easy-to-use VM backup solutions that I have encountered. Although we had rsync in place to protect our critical data, the whole process was labor-intensive and chaotic. With Nakivo Backup & Replication, I now sleep better knowing that any sort of disaster will be mitigated, especially with VM replication and backup copy functionality. The biggest advantage for us is that with the storage savings, we can backup 60% more data, while completing the entire process in about a third of the time it previously took,” says Brown.