Environmental Firm MSE Group Accelerates VM Backup “by 4X” With Nakivo

Nakivo Inc. has announced that MSE Group, LLC has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

MSE Group is an environmental, engineering, geology, construction and health and safety company with a focus on providing service to private, industrial, municipal and federal government clients. The company’s portfolio encompasses more than $1 billion in contract capacity and 500 customers nationwide.

With multiple offices across the US, the IT infrastructure of MSE Group relies on VMware. The VMs store Windows servers and databases, as well as a variety of documents, videos, pictures, drawings, and files. MSE Group cannot afford to lose information; business-critical data loss could cost the company millions of dollars and innumerable man-hours. That is why a VM backup solution is needed to protect the company’s virtual environment and provide VM recovery and offsite backup, in case any kind of disaster were to strike.

“We had problems with our previous VM backup solution: first off, the backup speed was so slow that every single incremental backup took several hours. But most importantly, the product did not provide any type of VM backup verification, so we had no idea if our data would be recoverable in the end. We learned this the hard way when one of our VM backups became corrupted; we had to rebuild everything from an earlier backup, and that took way too long. Our business-critical services were running in a reduced capacity for over three days. After such an awful experience, we decided to abandon that product and started looking for replacement software that would provide us with reliability and a balanced price/functionality ratio,” says Jacob Crisafulli, IT manager, MSE Group.

MSE Group investigated the VM backup software market and tested several products. Backup & Replication became the company’s choice because of the software’s functionality and price point. Backup & Replication was then deployed as a pre-configured VMware virtual appliance and imported into vSphere.

“While I personally did not install and configure Nakivo Backup & Replication, the feedback that I got from MSE’s IT Specialist was that the whole process was effortless. The pre-configured virtual appliance was extremely easy to set up, and it took him only an hour to configure the product and initiate the first backup job,” says Crisafulli.

Using the VMware VM backup feature, MSE Group currently backups their VMs twice daily – jobs are scheduled for the afternoon and later on during the night.

“The initial full VM backup took approximately 10 to 12 hours, which was expected, as we have several terabytes of data. Now, with forever-incremental backup, we only have to do the increments, and the time they take ranges from five minutes to two hours, with the average backup job finishing within 30 minutes. Whereas our previous solution would have taken us at least two hours to backup, we can finish in roughly 30 minutes with Nakivo Backup & Replication,” explains Crisafulli.

MSE Group copies their backups to offsite locations to ensure their data is protected even if the primary backups were to be compromised by unexpected events.

“We use backup copy not even primarily for software or hardware failures, but essentially to protect us against any types of physical or natural disasters. Basically, having an extra copy of backups is essential to make sure that our data can always be recovered,” says Crisafulli.

Another feature that provides MSE Group with an extra assurance of recoverability is screenshot verification.

“With Nakivo Backup & Replication, we can automatically verify VM backups. It is exciting to know that we have good backups and that VMs can be recovered from these. Screenshot verification would have prevented that situation where a corrupted VM backup caught us off guard and we experienced several days of reduced capacities,” says Crisafulli.

Lastly, he appreciates the network acceleration feature because of its ability to save network bandwidth.

“With our old software, VM backup jobs took longer to finish, while with Nakivo Backup & Replication the backup speed is awesome and network load is minimized at the same time. Now, a lot less data is going offsite due to network acceleration,” he reports.

Backup & Replication deployed as a pre-configured VMware virtual appliance provides MSE Group with improved VM backup performance, offsite backup capabilities, and a near-instant way to verify their backups. The company increased VM backup speed by 4X with network acceleration and forever-incremental backup, as compared to their previous VM backup solution. In addition, MSE Group can rest assured that their backups are recoverable.

“What we like about Nakivo Backup & Replication is the speed, network acceleration, screenshot verification, as well as the deduplication and compression, which helped us save storage space. We also appreciate the backup administration time savings of at least 50% on monitoring and managing the backup jobs. Overall, we have much more faith in Nakivo Backup & Replication due to significant time savings and better backup reliability,” says Crisafulli.