Czech IT Service Provider KOstax Chooses Nakivo Backup & Replication

Nakivo, Inc. announced that KOstax s.r.o. has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Kostax is a Czech company that provides IT solutions and services to its customers. The company’s customers comprise of educational institutions, government authorities, state administration bodies, production plants and SMBs.

Its IT infrastructure is spread across two sites and is fully virtualized. VMware VMs run a variety of servers at the company’s HQs, including a data server, an Exchange server, a Microsoft Active Directory server, and a SQL server. Furthermore, VMs at the hosting location run terminal services, open-source web servers, and open-source mail servers. Backup of all critical IT systems is essential because the company needs to be able to recover all of their VMs or move them elsewhere in the event of a disaster or hardware failure.

In the past, KOstax had been using a legacy data protection approach that was based on physical server backup via open-source utilities, however, the features and functionality of their previous solution were not up to par.

“The functionality of the previous solution was not the best, and did not support our virtualized environment appropriately. The whole process of backing up VMs was cumbersome and required us to spend at least 30 minutes a day on backup verification. Secondly, we did not have the basic features that most VM backup solutions offer nowadays. Overall, we were concerned about the protection of our IT systems and needed a reliable VM backup solution that would protect not only our internal data, but also the data of our customers,” says Daniel Beták, CEO, KOstax.

Bakotech s.r.o., a VAD, initially introduced Backup & Replication to KOstax.

KOstax, being a Nakivo Silver Partner, resell the product to its customers and offers data protection functionality that fulfills the requirements of both KOstax and their customers at a reasonable price.

With Nakivo, KOstax protects entire VMs with image-based backup.

“In contrast to our previous approach, we’re now performing image-based backup of our VMware VMs, so that the backup contains everything required for VM recovery,” explains Beták.

At Kostax, backup jobs are scheduled to run every 30 minutes throughout the day. Backup jobs finish within various short amounts of time, with some taking just a few minutes to complete.

“For sure, the whole process of backup and backup verification is much faster now with Nakivo Backup & Replication. We used to spend at least 30 minutes a day on backup verification, but now, we do not spend any time at all on this, as the software runs automatically. We were also pleasantly surprised that some backup jobs now take only a few minutes a day,” Beták reports.

In addition to the VM backup functionality, Kostax can also store backup copies offsite to safeguard data in case of a disaster.

“With Nakivo Backup & Replication, we are also able to copy backups across the WAN to our secondary location, and that was not possible with our previous solution at all, so all this extra functionality is fantastic. Backup Copy provides an extra layer of reliability and protection for our IT systems,” says Beták.

The decision to switch from the previous legacy backup system was attributed to concerns over data protection; with Nakivo, all data and applications are protected in a secure and reliable way.

With Nakivo, KOstax can recover files, Exchange objects, Microsoft Active Directory objects, and SQL objects from compressed and deduplicated VM backups.

“I like the simplicity and ease of recovering a particular file or object from a specific recovery point,” says Beták.

In the future, the company aims to test and implement some of the other features that Nakivo provides, such as network acceleration, data deduplication, LAN-free backup and instant VM recovery.

Nakivo provides KOstax a solution for protecting VMs with image-based and forever-incremental backup. With Backup Copy, the company is able to keep extra copies of backups offsite, to ensure that their most important VM backups remain safe and secure even if a disaster were to affect the whole of the primary location. Lastly, instant file recovery and instant object recovery allow them to recover files, Exchange objects, Microsoft Active Directory objects, and SQL objects near-instantly.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication is a comprehensive, fast, and fully-featured VM backup solution for protecting virtual environments. The software provides us with new functionality and features, and a variety of possibilities for backing up our VMware VMs. With Nakivo Backup & Replication, we achieved the highest level of protection and reliability for our data,” adds Beták.