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Québec City Airport Customer of Nakivo and Qnap

To protect VMware environment

Québec City Airport Inc. (AQi) has selected Nakivo Backup & Replication to protect their virtual environment.

Québec City Airport Chooses Nakivo And Qnap

AQi is a non-profit corporation that manages the Québec City Jean Lesage International Airport (YQB), the main airport in Quebec City, the capital of Quebec, Canada. The airport receives approximately 1.7 million passengers a year, with flights to different destinations in Canada, the US, Mexico and Central America, the Caribbean, and Europe.

The airport’s IT infrastructure consists of 7 VMware hosts (vSphere 6.5) and more than 150 VMs. VMs store SQL data servers, file servers, and many application servers, including special applications for the airport management.

AQi previously used another VM backup solution, but they were not satisfied with the high level of complexity of the software’s management which made it difficult to operate the software. Additionally, restoring entire VMs and individual files took too long.

It switched to Backup & Replication for two reasons: “Primarily, the simplicity of the software’s management,” says Jean, network technician, AQi. “It’s a lot easier for our IT team with Nakivo Backup & Replication than with the solution we had before. Secondly, the price was also important for us.

AQi installed Backup & Replication on their Qnap NAS server to create their own VM backup appliance. Such integration of software and storage provides additional protection for the airport in the event of a disaster, while removing backup loads from their infrastructure. NASDIS, network protocols (NFS and CIFS) are avoided, which speeds up the whole backup process. Qnap is one of several NAS vendors supported by Nakivo (Synology NAS, Asustor, Western Digital, and NetGear are also supported).

Since AQi acquired their Qnap servers, they have been able to save money by using the Nakivo solution and Qnap together.

I really enjoy the fact that there is a choice of servers that you can purchase, not just the one server required by the manufacturer. Manufacturers often sell servers that are really not compatible with anything; this is not the case with Qnap. With Nakivo Backup & Replication and Qnap, we use the software and hardware as a VM backup appliance, and save a lot of money,” said Jean.

Installation and configuration was easy and extremely fast. In less than half an hour, the software was already working,” Jean said.

The airport uses Nakivo to backup all their VMware VMs every night.

Deduplication functionality really helps us reduce the amount of data to backup,” explains Jean.

Thanks to this reduction, AQi can backup all of its VMs in under 2 hours. Moreover, the airport uses the backup copy functionality. The first Qnap NAS server receives the VM backup, and a copy of the backup is automatically sent a the second NAS. For their most important data, like financial data, the airport uses Backup & Replication’s backup to cloud functionality as well.

Jean appreciates the retention functionality of Nakivo, which allows him to choose how many recovery points to keep with the GFS hierarchical rotation method (grandfather – father – son). He also enjoys the reporting tools provided by Nakivo, especially the feature – screenshot verification.

Whenever a VM backup is complete, Backup & Replication can automatically perform an instant restore test of the VM and send you a report by email with a screenshot of the booted OS.

With the simplified management of the Nakivo solution, Jean can restore individual files and entire VMs much more quickly than with the old solution.

Nakivo Backup & Replication gives me more time to do something else in my job instead of just focusing on VM backup management, which would take up all of my time. With Nakivo Backup & Replication, the management monopolizes much less time than it did before and I am quite happy about that,” says Jean.

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