The University of Colorado Denver Implements Nakivo

Nakivo Inc. announced that the School of Education & Human Development (SEHD) at the University of Colorado Denver has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Established in 1973, The SEHD at the University of Colorado Denver attracts students who are passionate about careers in teaching and mental health. The school offers not only graduate and undergraduate options, but also many continuing and professional education certificates.

“VMware VMs store our help-desk system, including a couple of internal student information databases, some legacy systems, web development, and vCenter backup servers. If a disaster strikes, it is imperative to recover our legacy system that allows faculty to keep track of their notes and students,” says Matt Mitchell, web developer, SEHD, University of Colorado Denver.

“With the previous backup tool, the support license has expired, and at the same time, we upgraded our VMware infrastructure to ESXi 6.5, and all VMware VM backups just stopped working. Furthermore, this backup solution did not have a web interface, general notifications were mediocre, and storage space was expanding rapidly. It was very cumbersome to set up backup jobs and I had to spend time on backup administration, since those backup jobs were failing regularly,” says Mitchell.

Backup & Replication offers a rich feature set for protecting virtualized environments, and performs better than other backup solutions.

“I downloaded and installed Nakivo Backup & Replication on a backup server. The whole installation process took maybe five minutes and the software was up and running probably within a half an hour,” says Matt.

“We perform VM backup every single day and usually it takes a couple of hours for backup jobs to finish. I do not have to worry about failed VM backups anymore because Nakivo Backup & Replication is reliable, and I no longer have to waste time on backup administration, like I did in the past. In terms of VM replication, I replicate VMs to the same location just for the testing purposes. I had a VMware VM that had a wrong version of VMware tools set up, so I replicated that VM, and then made the necessary updates to VMware tools, so that the VM replica would be identical with the source VM. After that, I was able to fail over from the source VM to the VM replica, and return back with failback,” says Matt.

“With the previous backup tool, I was not able to perform full VM recovery, but with Nakivo Backup & Replication, I am able to recover VMware VMs within 10 minutes. Lastly, I was able to decrease storage space with data deduplication, resulting in more efficient disk space utilization and lower storage costs,” says Matt.

Backup & Replication provides SEHD with quick and efficient VM backup and reduced backup administration time.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication solved our problem with failing backup jobs and I do not waste time on those failed backups anymore. With previous backup tool, I could not recover full VMs, but with Nakivo Backup & Replication, I can recover VMware VMs within 10 minutes. With data deduplication, we were able to decrease storage space by 80%,” says Matt.