Classic Hotels and Resorts Opts for Nakivo With Qnap

Nakivo Inc. announced that Classic Hotels & Resorts has selected its Backup & Replication to protect itd virtual environment.

Classic Hotels and Resorts is a full-service hotel and resort management company with resources, located in the southwest of the US. At Classic Hotels & Resorts, the ambition is to develop a hospitality management company based on enduring relationships with their guests, employees, and owners. Another quality that makes the company unique is that Classic Hotels & Resorts owns and manages all of their hotels. Currently, the hospitality chain has 6 properties.

The Arizona Grand Resort is considered the chain’s central location and their corporate office, while the other 5 locations include hotels/resorts in Arizona and California. The chain’s current workloads run on approximately 85 VMware VMs spread across all six locations. Most of Hotel’s data is structured data that includes various office files. The chain also runs several databases for property management systems, point of sale systems, and HR systems. the hospitality chain is required to keep their data safe, in case of disaster, by PCI compliance, as well as for BC purposes. The IT team understand that VM backups are the base of daily operations for their IT department and that a reliable VM backup solution is a necessity for data protection.

Not so long ago, the hospitality chain was reliant on a cloud-based backup solution to protect their VMware VMs. Their main issue with this system was the long recovery time, as data needed to be re-hydrated back from the cloud. The cloud-based solution also required significant monetary investment from the hospitably chain.

“Our previous solution was not efficient enough, and the cost-benefit failed to deliver the best data protection experience for the money spent,” says Jose M. Solis, senior systems/network engineer, Classic Resorts and Hotels.

Backup & Replication became the VM backup solution of choice for the hospitality chain due to the great user reviews on multiple websites across the web. Nakivo solution provided complete functionality at a fraction of a cost, in comparison to the other vendors in the industry. The product was selected because of its compatibility with different NAS, particularly with Qnap. By creating a NAS-based backup appliance, Classic Hotels & Resorts were able to utilize already available hardware together with the newly purchased software.

“Installation on a Qnap NAS is the greatest feature for us. The whole installation process was completed in a matter of minutes. Additionally, we took another 10mn to configure the basics and kicked off our first backup job soon after that. The web interface is extremely easy to understand and everything is laid out well. Installation on a Qnap NAS removes the necessity for purchasing dedicated physical servers or VMs that live on a protected environment,” says Solis.

Nakivo solution provides the hospitality chain with reliable VM backup and data deduplication functionality that is used for storage space reduction. With CBT, VM backup speed is increased for the chain, as only changed data gets transferred to the backup repository.

“Due to CBT, we are only backing up the changes that took place after the initial full backup, so forever-incremental backup takes much less time. We enjoy the fact that setting up a new backup job takes only few mouse clicks to complete. Additionally, global data deduplication saves a ton of storage space for us,” says Solis.

With the web interface and email notifications, Nakivo solution requires little monitoring, thus helping the IT team to focus on other pressing IT issues.

“With the help of email notifications, we always know when a backup job has been completed. If there are any issues, we also can see them through the email notifications. Then, we just check for new software updates every couple of months to make sure we are using the latest version. Other than that, the software is easy to operate and manage, thus saving us time on backup administration,” says Solis.

Nakivo solution installed on a Qnap NAS provides Classic Hotels & Resorts with fast forever-incremental backup, storage space savings, and monetary savings as well. With CBT, VM backup is faster since only changed data gets backed up. Data deduplication saves storage space for the hospitality chain, while easy-to-use web interface and email notifications save time on backup administration. In terms of monetary savings, Classic Hotels & Resorts saved 50% in that arena.

“We calculated a 50% cost reduction by purchasing Backup & Replication. It lets you save on licensing and expensive hardware purchases. We are now at peace knowing that our data is safe and readily available. The fact that we were able to save a ton of money is always something to brag about,” says Solis.