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Nakivo and Qnap Improving VM Backup and Recovery Times for Parex Resources

Customer is oil and gas company from Alberta, Canada.

Parex Resources Inc., an oil and gas company from Alberta, Canada, achieved fast VM backup and VM recovery, saved storage space, and obtained better visibility and reporting with Nakivo Backup & Replication installed on a QNAP NAS.

Parex Resources

Parex is engaged in crude oil exploration, development and production in Colombia. Through foreign subsidiaries, the company holds interests in onshore exploration and production blocks totaling in approximately 1.6 million gross acres.

Parex’s IT infrastructure is distributed via two sites, where each site has two physical servers and approximately 35 to 40 VMware VMs. Nearly all of the production servers are virtualized, including three SQL servers per site, an Oracle database, and file servers. The company stores historical files that can trace back for months or years; protecting this information is critical, as the organization’s users require constant access to files. Therefore, Parex depends on a VM backup solution to provide them with not only reliable VM backup, but also quick VM and file recovery. The ultimate goal for the organization is to be available 24/7 and achieve near-instant VM and file recovery.

Approximately two years ago, Parex performed backup to tape, but the process was too time-consuming. Thereafter, it depended on another backup product for data availability, however, increasing storage space was slowly becoming a problem.

We decided to look for another VM backup solution to provide us with better flexibility and faster VM backups. Moreover, we wanted to achieve near-instant VM recovery because the recovery usually took nearly 10 minutes with the previous product, and days with the backup to tape approach. We wanted ease-of-use, a simple user interface, great functionality, and fast VM backup and recovery speed,” says Alejandro Trevino, senior IT administrator, Parex.

Parex’s IT team decided to select Backup & Replication, a fast, easy-to-use, and affordable VM backup solution designed for VMware environments. The solution provides VM backup, instant VM recovery, instant file recovery, and data deduplication functionality.

Trevino first encountered the Nakivo solution as an application that was available on the QNAP App-Center, which led to his curiosity about the product. He first tested the software thoroughly and then reviewed online testimonials, before deciding to select the product.

Currently, we have two QNAP NAS servers, one in our Canadian site, another in our Columbian site. We installed Nakivo Backup & Replication on our QNAP NAS servers, and now the data gets backed up through the local servers. Overall, Nakivo Backup & Replication is an extremely easy software to set up. Of course, I read some technical documentation and contacted support several times, however, this was mostly out of curiosity and desire to learn, rather than having difficulty with understanding the software and its user interface. Support is great, as I always received answers to my questions extremely fast and the support guys were always on top of my support tickets,” explains Trevino.

With the previous backup product, Parex started to notice limited storage space, while with the Nakivo solution installed on a QNAP NAS, storage space is ultimately saved with data deduplication, compression, and skip swap files and partitions.

With Nakivo and QNAP, we managed to save 100% of our data because if we start running out of storage space, we can always just put in another HDD. Basically, right now, we can probably run 20 years of backups. Not only that, but because of Nakivo Backup & Replication’s space saving features, we can schedule more backup jobs and keep backups for longer periods of time in the backup repository. Such a combination of hardware and software brought us amazing results, not to mention that the price for both products was way better than that of the competitors,” says Trevino.

With Nakivo, Parex’s IT team can backup their VMware VMs faster than with their previous backup product, and especially faster than the backup to tape approach.

With backup to tape, the whole backup usually took two to five days. With the previous backup product, backups were much faster, but because we were running out of storage space, we could only store our backups for 6 months. Now, with Nakivo Backup & Replication, the forever-incremental backups usually take 20 minutes, and we can keep backups for probably 20 years which is a huge difference,” reports Trevino.

Alejandro was also impressed with instant VM recovery and instant file recovery. The functionality allows the IT team to recover any failed VMs directly from compressed and deduplicated VM backups. While with instant file recovery, files can be recovered in just seconds.

Nakivo Backup & Replication provides much better recovery functionality. We perform regular tests, to ensure that everything works correctly. The results were excellent for both instant VM recovery and instant file recovery. Flash VM Boot recovers entire VMs in less than a minute now,” says Trevino.

Parex’s IT team also rely on Nakivo for automated reporting of their VMware environment. Previously, it did not have complete visibility in their virtual infrastructure, while now, they can see how the virtual environment is functioning.

Every single day I receive a report and email notifications as soon as our backup jobs finish successfully. Previously, reports were hard to find and understand, but now everything is perfectly visible in a single PDF,” says Trevino.

The solution installed on a QNAP NAS provides Parex with fast VM backups that require less storage space. The forever-incremental backups finish in more or less 20 minutes, while with the backup to tape approach, backup usually took two to five days. Moreover, Nakivo and QNAP allowed Parex to save their storage space, allowing the company to store backups for approximately 20 years. In addition, Nakivo and QNAP licensing costs were more affordable than that of other VM backup products available on the market.

Parex can recover entire VMs and files much faster than with their previous backup product, enabling the IT team to provide information to the company’s users much faster. Finally, automated reporting and email notifications provide visibility for the IT team and help them monitor activity and recognize problems early on.

Nakivo Backup & Replication provided our organization with fast VM backup, VM recovery, saved our storage space, and offered us efficient reporting capabilities. By going with Nakivo and QNAP, we definitely made the best decision,” says Trevino.

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