Ydilo Chooses Nakivo Backup & Replication

Nakivo, Inc. announced that Ydilo Advanced Voice Solutions, S.A. has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Ydilo provides voice and mobility solutions for the management and automation of customer care business processes by using technologies for mobile devices, speech recognition, and multi-channel customer interaction analysis. Ydilo’s customers include banks (Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, S.A. (BBVA), ING Spain, Bankia S.A.) as well as operators like Movistar and Masmovil. Ydilo’s main datacenter is located at their HQs in Madrid, Spain. The company has 30 physical servers, where ten of them are ESXi hosts.

Being one of the largest voice recognition SaaS, the majority of the company’s VMs are MySQL database servers and Windows 2008-2012 IVR servers, running Nuance Recognition Software. These servers are an important part of Ydilo’s business, as they provide voice recognition services to their customers, in addition to automating customer care business. As Ydilo manages sensitive customer information, including call recordings, it is important that none of this critical data is lost.

Over the last three years, it has slowly been virtualizing their environment, which has resulted in a reduction of their costs. Once the company decided to move to VMware, Inc., the old backup system that was based on tapes (and was slow and difficult to manage) had to go too. The backup to tape process was old and difficult to maintain, as it included the changing of tapes as well as the management of snapshots. Of course, the main problem of the old backup system was that the product made backups of files, and not of VMs.

“Generally, around six hours were needed to backup our infrastructure to tapes. The recovery time was also slow. Furthermore, two engineers were spending around three days every month to manage the backup process. We definitely needed to upgrade to a more modern backup solution that was built specifically for virtualized environments,” says Srdjan Murftic, support and project manager, Ydilo.

Ydilo’s IT team analyzed the market, and after a period of testing and evaluation, selected Nakivo Backup & Replication for its cost-effectiveness, ease-of-use, and reliability. Backup & Replication’s reputation was confirmed through multiple 5-start customer reviews from different online platforms, thus making Ydilo more confident in their decision. Backup & Replication is designed for VMware environments and offers the functionality that is needed to protect Ydilo’s information.

Currently, Ydilo’s IT team have installed the Nakivo solution on a Windows server and perform their VM backup to a NAS device.

“The first time I installed Nakivo Backup & Replication I was pleasantly surprised, as the process was easy and intuitive. My first thought was that the product was just basic, as I only tried to backup a small VM. However, when I tried to backup and recover a big Virtual Center server, the software did its job as efficiently as it did with a small VM. Overall, we spent maybe 3-4 hours on installation, configuration, and programming the backups,” says Murftic.

Backup to tape took nearly six hours with the previous backup product, while the Nakivo solution performs the same task but in only around two hours.

“Half of our environment is backed up on one night, and the other half is done on a second night. Thus, we have a backup every 48 hours. Moreover, before we were not able to do forever-incremental backup, we were only able to copy the files to tape. The whole process was time-consuming and costly. With Backup & Replication not only were we able to improve the timing of our backups, but we also saved 95% of our IT team’s time on backup administration,” says Srdjan.

Backup & Replication provides Ydilo with new functionality, including global data deduplication, VM replication, and instant VM recovery.

“With global data deduplication, we were able to save a considerable amount of storage space on our NAS device. VM replication and instant VM recovery are also fast and reliable,” says Murftic.

Backup & Replication provides Ydilo with improved VM backup performance, easy VM recovery, and time savings in terms of backup administration. Ydilo can backup their entire VMware environment in nearly two hours, while previously, backup to tape took approximately six hours. Global data deduplication offers the company storage space savings on their NAS device; while instant VM recovery provides Ydilo with the ability to recover entire VMware VMs near-instantly. Finally, Backup & Replication helped Ydilo reduce their backup administration time by 95%.

“Backup & Replication saved us time and money. The product reduced my team’s time on backup management and scheduling by 95%. Furthermore, as we installed the software on our existing hardware, the cost of buying any additional hardware is zero. The competitive price of the licenses and the functionality that we have with Nakivo, made us decide that this VM backup solution was principal for our VMware environment,” says Murftic.