Institution des Eaux de la Montagne Noire, French Water Management Institution, Chooses Nakivo

Nakivo, Inc. announced that Institution des Eaux de la Montagne Noire (IEMN) has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their environment.

IEMN is a water management institution in Southwest France that develops and manages the hydraulic system of the Montagne Noire mountain range. Its mission is to produce a sufficient quantity of quality drinking water for municipalities in the region, which in turn distribute that water to their inhabitants. In addition, it provides quality water to meet agricultural irrigation needs in the Lauragais region. The institution is also responsible for the storage and transportation of water resources.

Its IT infrastructure consists of 2 separate sites, 5 physical servers and 36 VMs. VMs store various databases, web servers, web applications, Microsoft Active Directory servers, printing servers and other critical documents. To ensure the continuity of its services to all the communities across the Lauragais region, IEMN has to rely on backup and recovery. Time is of essence if a disaster or an outage occurs in the data center and the institution has not time to spare on reinstalling servers or recreating data. Only a reliable VM backup solution designed for virtualized servers can guarantee that it has continuous access to its critical data and applications.

IEMN was protecting its data using another VM backup solution. Since it is being supported by the governmental funding, budget is a concern.

“We were not satisfied with the price that the previous vendor offered us. The main criteria for us was honestly the price point because we are very price sensitive. That is why we decided to find a more affordable software that would meet our needs,” says Victor Mendes, system and network administrator, IEMN.

IEMN chose to deploy Backup & Replication to ensure continuous availability of its services. The decision was made based on the software’s functionalities available at an affordable price. Te vendor offers virtual, physical and cloud data protection, in addition to Microsoft Office 365 backup and backup to tape. It can also be installed on a variety of NAS devices, including Qnap, which IEMN already owned.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication offered us integration with our Qnap TS-983XU-RP and we were amazed at how simple and fast the whole process has been so far. Simplicity is the main advantage of Nakivo Backup & Replication over all other vendors. We now have a more affordable backup appliance, that is simple to manage and cost-efficient,” explains Mendes.

With Nakivo solution, IEMN enjoys the benefits of forever-incremental backup and network acceleration functionality.

“With network acceleration, VM backup speed is increased and network load is reduced. Plus, backup jobs are completed at a faster rate since the amount of data that is transferred over the network is reduced,” he adds. “With forever-incremental backup, IEMN can take advantage of the VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology that identifies changed data and transfer only those changes to the backup repository. This functionality increases VM backup speed and saves storage space. Previously, a VM backup of our entire infrastructure was impossible to perform daily. Now, VM backups are done every day and that is awesome.“

With instant file and object recovery, IEMN recovers entire files and Exchange objects within minutes. Instant object recovery for Exchange makes it possible to recover emails directly from compressed and deduplicated VM backups, without having to recover an entire VM first. It can recover lost, deleted or corrupted files/objects to their original location, download them, or send them to email.

Finally, IEMN takes advantage of Microsoft Active Directory integration offered by the vendor to align the software with the institution’s security policy and provide admin and guest access to the Nakivo solution.

The solution installed on a Qnap NAS offers IEMN ease-of-use combined with monetary and performance savings. IEMN can backup its entire IT infrastructure daily. Moreover, the institution has the possibility of recovering entire files and objects near instantly. Previously, Exchange recovery was only possible via a third party.

“Our entire experience with Backup & Replication has been great so far, as we achieved simplicity and improved performance overall. Backup & Replication definitely saved time and money for IEMN,” says Mendes.