IT Company VSN Systems in Netherlands Using Nakivo

Nakivo, Inc. announced that VSN (Voice Systems Netherlands) Systems BV has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their Hyper-V environment.

VSN is an IT company that is responsible for the network, application, and systems management of a large worldwide telecommunications network. Through a pragmatic approach and with over 25 years of experience, it aims to meet the standards set by their customers.

Its IT infrastructure consists of two sites: one office location and one datacenter. The office location, in Venray, counts around 180 servers, many of which run Hyper-V. The datacenter hosts a much larger number of servers, with nearly 900 VMs running on VMware.

VSN has many VMs that would be exceedingly complicated and time-intensive to rebuild from scratch, if they were to become corrupt. Particularly if some business-critical VMs were to become unavailable, it might result in VSN’s customers being unable to call or deposit a new balance on their VoIP accounts. That is why the VMs must be backed up on a daily basis, and it is crucial for them to be available for recovery in the event of a failure. Some of the company’s virtual servers could take up to several days to recover with legacy methods, depending on their type and configuration, thus in order to avoid such delays, an efficient VM backup solution is required.

“In the past, we relied on VMware’s backup solution for data protection. The VM backup solution was unstable and had several disadvantages. Sometimes, the product caused snapshot locks on the file system, especially after a storage failover. In addition, the product would often stop processing the entire backup job as soon as a single VM backup failed, which would result in the rest of the VMs not being backed up either. When VMware announced that they would be discontinuing this product, we finally started looking into other VM backup solutions. Our criteria were pretty straight-forward: full VM and forever-incremental backup, fast and easy VM recovery, and ease of use, so that someone with little to no technical experience would be able to use the software,” says Ray Zorg, data center specialist, VSN.

After trying and testing multiple VM backup solutions available on the market, VSN decided to utilize Backup & Replication due to the product’s ease of use and pricing model. While other IT vendors impose a maximum limit of sockets, forcing customers into more expensive product versions, Backup & Replication’s PRO Edition has no such restrictions. Moreover, even during the testing stage, Nakivo’snsupport stood out from the other competition for VSN. VSN tested installation on Windows and Linux, and both options were easy enough to complete even for users with minimal technical knowledge. So far, Backup & Replication has been outperforming VSN’s previous solution in terms of VM backup performance and retention policy.

“It takes us approximately 3 hours to run and complete all the configured VM backup jobs. We have eight backup jobs in total that run every night, and each has a retention of one recovery point per day for the last six days, and one recovery point per week for the two weeks preceding that. This retention policy helps us tremendously, as our VM configuration changes quite frequently, so a maximum of two weeks for retention is sufficient for us,” explains Zorg. “As I mentioned previously, our past solution would stop processing all other backup jobs as soon as a single VM backup job failed, but with Nakivo Backup & Replication, all of that is in the past.“

Backup & Replication offers improved VM backup performance, and also improved job management compared to VSN’s previous solution.

“I enjoy how I can chain all the VM backup jobs so that they run one after another. Even if one fails, Nakivo Backup & Replication will still complete all of the other backup jobs in the chain. As a result, we achieved much better backup management and more efficient backup scheduling,” Zorg adds.

With Backup & Replication’s instant VM recovery, VSN saved a full day of work on VM recovery.

“When one VM became irreparably damaged, Flash VM Boot restored that VM near-instantly. With the old VM backup solution, we would have needed one full day of work to rebuild that VM from scratch. Due to significant issues with that solution, we also had to re-enter the entire VM configuration on a weekly basis,” says Zorg.

In addition to instant VM recovery, he sees the product’s instant file recovery feature as being potentially useful to them in the future.

Backup & Replication provides VSN with improved VM backup performance, job chaining functionality, and simplified VM recovery. With job chaining, VSN chains multiple VM backup jobs so that they run one after another. The company is able to recover their VMs near-instantly, rather than rebuilding them from scratch. The easy-to-use web interface also saves VSN a lot of headaches, as their customers are even able to use Backup & Replication themselves.

“Our old VM backup solution was prone to instability and left us with unreliable VM backups. Nakivo Backup & Replication is reliable and stable, and offers great performance. Moreover, Nakivo Backup & Replication has allowed us to centralize our entire VM backup configuration. The software also provides us with a central point to view backup jobs’ statuses and progress – a much needed feature for any datacenter management department,” says Zorg.