Zufall Health Center Recovers VMs “20X Faster” With Nakivo

Nakivo Inc. has announced that Zufall Health Center has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Zufall Health is a healthcare provider offering quality and affordable medical and dental care to the community, with 11 locations in north, west, and central New Jersey. Its IT infrastructure is spread across two New Jersey sites. Their virtual environment consists primarily of VMware ESXi hosts, but they also have Hyper-V servers.

Nearly 50 VMs run Exchange servers, file servers, SQL servers, FTP servers, and special medical software. The many healthcare professionals at Zufall Health require immediate access to the patient records in order to diagnose and treat them appropriately, so this information needs to be reliably protected. If they cannot backup their critical data every day, they risk losing important data.

Over the last two years, Zufall Health used two different VM backup solutions, and neither product met the organization’s expectations.

“Our first VM backup solution corrupted our VMs on a regular basis, and when we tried to recover them from the VM backups, we were often unsuccessful. Thus, we had to rebuild VMs manually, which was an extremely time-consuming process. Our second VM backup software worked better but still was not an ideal solution. With this product, VM recovery time was usually 20 minutes, but definitely not near-instant. In addition, we wanted to copy our VM backups to the cloud, but the solution did not support such functionality. We started investigating other VM backup solutions. We ultimately wanted a perfect combination of ease of use, pricing, and functionality. Functionality was at the top of the priority list, as we wanted to decrease VM recovery time, replicate VMs offsite, and have the option to backup VMs to cloud,” says Alex Martinez, network administrator, Zufall Health.

Zufall Health replaced their last VM backup solution with Nakivo. The solution ensures its centers have 24/7 availability of critical data, so that their healthcare professionals can fully utilize patient information and records.

“My first impression of Nakivo Backup & Replication was immensely positive. Even during the testing period, we noticed faster VM backup and recovery performance, and we greatly appreciated the fact that agents needed to be installed,” says Martinez.

With Nakivo, VM backup is fast, allowing Zufall Health to backup all of their VMs every day. VM backup used to take at least 8 hours, but with Nakivo takes 15 minutes on average.

“With the previous VM backup solution, I would come to the office in the morning, and the backup jobs would still be running from the previous night. Now, the forever-incremental backup takes only 15 minutes. On top of that, with screenshot verification, we can immediately verify our VM backups on a daily basis to make sure that the VMs can be recovered. We did not have such functionality with the past product, and it is a very reassuring feature to have,” says Martinez.

Nakivo also provides Zufall Health with additional functionality that was not possible before. It can replicate VMs offsite and backup VMs to cloud.

“We are looking forward to implementing VM backup to cloud in the near future. We are slowly building our DR strategy and want to avoid storing all our data in one place. We have already taken advantage of VM replication. We create VM replicas and store them in our secondary location, so that if something happens to our primary office, we can instantly turn on the VM replicas offsite,” says Martinez.

In addition to VM replication, Zufall Health uses Nakivo to recover both entire VMs and application objects (Exchange and SQL objects).

“When an email was accidentally deleted, I was able to quickly recover that email with instant object recovery for Exchange. Furthermore, with instant VM recovery, we are able to recover a full VM in just a minute. Previously, to recover a small VM, we needed 20 minutes or so, but with Nakivo Backup & Replication’s Flash VM Boot, a much larger VM can be recovered in just one minute. Essentially, this is 20X faster. When I first experienced this feature, I honestly could not believe the results,” says Martinez.

Nakivo provides Zufall Health centers with reliable VM backup, instant VM recovery, and the ability to replicate VMs offsite. The customer can backup their VMs within approximately 15 minutes, and they can recover large VMs within just one minute, which is 20X faster than with their past VM backup solution. With VM replication, the organization can create VM replicas and store them offsite, so that in the event of a disaster at the primary location, the VM replicas can be instantly booted at the secondary location.

“When we compare Nakivo Backup & Replication to the previous VM backup solution, it’s like day and night. Not only did we improve VM backup performance and VM recovery times, but we also now save a significant amount of time on backup management. I no longer have to check the logs daily, as I did with the previous VM backup solution. Ultimately, Nakivo Backup & Replication is the best choice for us in terms of pricing, ease of use, and performance,” says Martinez.