Southern Surgery and Urology Using Nakivo

Nakivo, Inc. announced that Southern Surgery and Urology has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Southern Surgery and Urology is based in Hattiesburg, MS. The center’s ten physicians provide general surgery, as well as urology services to their patients. In 2017, Southern Surgery and Urology decided to virtualize their IT environment on vSphere ESXi. The center is still slowly transitioning to complete virtualization of their entire IT infrastructure.

As of now, key VMware VMs run the center’s two primary medical software servers and a vCenter server. During the virtualization phase, Southern Surgery and Urology had two goals that they aimed to achieve. The center wanted to backup their critical VMware VMs onsite, while also copying VM backups offsite.

Southern Surgery and Urology’s medical software is the center’s most critical system. It needs to be available because patient care would be severely impacted without proper access to the patient information. In addition, the weather can be unpredictable in the southern parts of the USA; tornadoes are a particular concern in these areas. Southern Surgery and Urology only has one site, consequently, weather can directly impact data availability, networks, and the success of the center’s day-to-day operations. In the past, the center did not have a stable VM backup solution nor an offsite DR strategy. Southern Surgery and Urology has since purchased a cloud-based backup software, designed to backup files and folders.

“We were backing up file level changes with a cloud-based backup software to a local NAS. Also, we were doing backups to Amazon S3. Backup speed was slow, as backups of two primary medical software servers were taking from two to three hours every night. Moreover, there was no way to verify that a backup had been completed successfully, while notifications and reporting could have been better. As we moved our environment to vSphere ESXi, we definitely needed a reliable VM backup solution. Nakivo Backup & Replication was a perfect long-term solution for us, in order to create a new DR strategy, by backing up VMware VMs onsite and sending backup copies offsite,” explains David Judice, IT manager, Southern Surgery and Urology.

The center replaced their cloud-based backup software with Backup & Replication to manage their virtual environment. The switch was implemented by Judice and an external IT consultant, who had previous experience with the product.

After the testing period, Southern Surgery and Urology chose Nakivo to protect their critical VMware VMs. VMware VMs are backed up onsite, while backup copies are created and sent offsite.

“As the IT consultant had experience with Nakivo Backup & Replication, the whole installation and configuration process went smoothly. He walked me through all the necessary steps, thus I could understand what was going on. After we upgraded to a newer version of the product, I myself was already quite proficient with Nakivo Backup & Replication,” says Judice.

VM backup performance is one of Nakivo’s benefits, as daily VM backup duration decreased from two or three hours to under an hour.

“I backup two large medical databases that store approximately 1.5TB of data every day. I backup VMs to a local NAS and the backups finish in around an hour, most time even less than that. The backup for a vCenter server, which is only 120GB, takes even less, under 10 minutes usually. With the previous cloud-based backup software, backups finished within two to three hours. While with Nakivo Backup & Replication, backups finish sometimes in even 40 minutes,” says Judice.

In addition to VM backup performance improvement, Southern Surgery and Urology also achieved storage space savings.

“With Nakivo Backup & Replication, we are using our storage space more efficiently and saving money on our external storage. Now, we can backup more data and store that data for longer period of time“, says Judice.

After backing up VMs onsite, David creates and copies backups offsite, in order to protect the primary infrastructure from any local disasters. VM backups are essentially copied to an external NAS. In an event of a major hardware or software failure or a natural disaster, Southern Surgery and Urology can recover their critical backups from the offsite location.

Nakivo provides Southern Surgery and Urology with email notifications (that include screenshot verification of successful backup completion), reporting, and monitoring capabilities.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication provides clear dashboards that inform us about backup job status and bandwidth usage. Furthermore, reporting is phenomenal and extremely informative. Reports make my job much easier,” Judice states.

Nakivo provides Southern Surgery and Urology with a DR strategy that consists of backing up VMs onsite and copying backups offsite. With Nakivo, the center improved VM backup performance, saved storage space, gained better visibility of backup with reporting capabilities, and gained assurance that their backups are done correctly while cutting backup time by 2.5X.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication is a great product at a phenomenal price. With reports and email notifications, I can better monitor the virtual environment of the Southern Surgery and Urology. By identifying and resolving issues quickly, I spend less time on the whole backup administration process. Overall, we are happy that Nakivo Backup, Replication allowed us to improve our DR strategy,” says Judice.