Radio Radio, in Rome, Italy, Customer of Nakivo

Nakivo, Inc. has announced that Radio Radio has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their virtual and physical environments.

Radio Radio is a radio station based in Rome, Italy. Radio Radio made its debut in 1978 and, thanks to its stable growth, is one of most widely-listened radio stations in central Italy. In the 80’s, it was the first talk radio and the first station to use the RDS (Radio Data System). Today, after over 40 years, it is accessible from every form of media: web, applications, FM, and TV, providing quality production and unencumbered free speech from its hosts, columnists, and commentators.

The station’s IT infrastructure consists of 3 physical servers that host 17 VMs, providing all services necessary to continue to function. All of the station’s VMs are hosted physically on 2 NAS devices. Data stored in the VMs can be divided into 3 types: office data, video data, and audio data.

The VMs are used for a variety of purposes, but mostly they function as web servers, hosting sites, and assorted applications for the employees. As the radio station is live 24/7, reliable VM backup and quick VM recovery are of importance for protecting the station’s data and getting quickly back online, should an error or an issue occur. Losing a single minute of streaming audio or video can impact the station severely in terms of being unable to reach their audience or broadcast advertisements. Overall, uninterrupted audio and video data access are critical to the station.

In the past, Radio Radio protected their data by using a different backup software from another vendor. The product required complete involvement of their IT team and the amount of time spent managing and operating the software had become unworkable. The station relied on a copy and paste policy to replicate VMs, which had proven itself an inefficient and unreliable approach. Additionally, the product did not offer the possibility for recovering entire VMs and files.

“We needed automation, security, and basically a solution that could offer us complete functionality, including VM backup, VM replication, and VM recovery,” says Massimiliano Santolo, IT manager, Radio Radio.

The station decided to select Nakivo due to the product’s ability to protect virtual, and physical environments as well, meaning that the radio can not only backup their VMs, but also their physical servers. The software offers Windows server backup to ensure data consistency of databases and applications. With VMware backup, the radio station can backup live VMs and all the application data. Moreover, Nakivo provides real time protection of the station’s data, as not only entire VMs can be recovered, but also individual files.

Nakivo provides an easy installation and configuration.

“Everything is incredibly simple. I just downloaded the file with the Ubuntu release and created our first VM. After some installation steps, I chose a password, and added NAS transporters and a vSphere instance. Installation on Ubuntu is best for us for now because we possess more control that way,” says Santolo.

Radio Radio takes advantage of the product’s VM backup and VM replication functionality. Even though the initial full VM backup took a long time to complete, all subsequent backup jobs take from 30 to 60mn, depending on the day of the week. With forever-incremental backup, only changes get transferred to the backup repository, thus increasing the backup speed. VM replication enables the station to stay online while creating VM replicas on the secondary site. If an issue or a disaster occurs, the station can promptly power on those VM replicas and operate from their secondary site without any disruptions.

“VM replication is a breeze. Easy to set up, fast to power on, if a VM has a problem,” says Santolo.

“I thoroughly enjoy Nakivo Backup & Replication’s functionality, particularly the instant file recovery that allows me to manage user errors, while developing software or managing video/audio files. Nakivo Backup & Replication has definitely resolved our problem with recovery, as we had no possibility to recover lost data at all before. Now, we can recover files and entire VMs quickly and reliably,” he added.

Nakivo provides Radio Radio with backup of their physical servers and VMs, VM replication, and VM recovery. With forever-incremental backup, backup jobs are completed in 30 to 60mn on average every day. Regarding VM replication, the radio station can replicate their VMs to a remote location in a fast and reliable way. Lastly, Radio Radio is finally able to recover entire VMs and single files.

“With Nakivo Backup & Replication, we’ve achieved automation and control of our backups’ quality. We also improved VM backup and VM recovery speed. We, as an IT team, save approximately 8 hours every week on backup management. Backup & Replication has also helped us get a good night’s sleep, too, just by knowing that everything is correctly saved every single night, without any errors,” says Santolo.