Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union Opts for Nakivo to Replace Tapes

Business Challenge
Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union (OSSU) serves school-age children from pre-kindergarten through 12^th grade in the towns of Craftsbury, Greensboro, Hardwick, Stannard, Wolcott, and Woodbury in the state of Vermont.

The school district believes in creating student, family, staff, and community partnerships with the goal of providing an education that is relevant and meaningful to each child in the district.

It virtualized the IT infrastructure of 52 physical servers and runs 6 physical servers and 10 VMs. VMs store user files, a student information system, and other functional needs systems used for the administration of the district. Backups are stored on the NAS devices at distributed locations. Ease of recovery is key to the DR procedures that are in place at the schools. As the school district stores a great amount of personal information, backup and recovery are crucial to the success of daily operations.

Before virtualization, tape backups were used for data protection. The main disadvantages were long backup times and slow recoveries. Nakivo Backup & Replication has been the school’s VM backup solution for 4 years and replaced backup to tape.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication was the right product for us due to the ease of use and manageability,” says David Martin, director of technology and communications, OSSU.

Solution
As one of the biggest drawbacks of backup to tape was speed, OSSU chose Backup & Replication for fast backups and recoveries. With backup to tape, large amounts of data were backed up extremely slowly, while recovering files also took a long time. Backup & Replication offers faster incremental VM backups and instant VM and granular recoveries.

Nakivo solution is installed on a Synology NAS box to create a backup appliance that combines hardware and software.

“The platform is user-friendly and just works. The whole process of installing and configuring was a breeze. The dashboard is also user-friendly. Seeing what is being backed up with the rate and time is a nice feature. Running a job outside of the normal schedule is also painless,” says Martin. “From scratch, the initial backup takes 4 to 6 hours. After the initial backup, the incremental backup takes less than 30 minutes. The product works. We can easily do a recovery, and notifications provide peace of mind, knowing data is backed up and protected.“

With instant granular recovery, individual files and objects can be recovered to their original location or to a new machine. Instant VM recovery, can completely recover entire VMs to production, if needed.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication lets us easily manage instant VM recovery and ensures data is backed up and safe. The ease of use is what sealed the deal. In addition, many times users need a file recovered. Thus, Nakivo Backup & Replication allows one to easily recover one file or a whole folder,” says Martin.

Results
By switching from backup to tape to VM backup, the end user managed to save time on backup. While recovery was previously a long process, now OSSU can recover entire VMs and individual files. Lastly, Backup & Replication helped the school save time on backup administration because of a user-friendly web interface and notifications center.

“Tapes were messy and took too much time. No swapping of tapes and just using NAS boxes has saved us one to 3 hours weekly. Moreover, technical support has resolved issues quickly and professionally, as they always find the best fix. Nakivo Backup & Replication has freed up time on backup administration and allows us to easily backup VMs. We now can easily recover and backup and have less headaches than with tape backups,” says Martin.