Radisson Park Inn Hotel Reduces VM Backup Storage With Nakivo

Nakivo Inc. announced that Radisson Park Inn Hotel, in Tallinn, Estonia, has selected Nakivo Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

The IT infrastructure at Radisson Park Inn hotel runs on VMware: “Almost all of our mission-critical services are virtualized,” says Roland Kalijurand, IT manager, Radisson Park Inn Hotel. “Most of our VMware VMs are Windows servers with SQL databases that run different services and operations, necessary for the successful hotel management and daily operation.“

All services at Radisson Park Inn require stable and dependable data protection. Safeguarding virtual infrastructure that supports hotel internal processes and contains customer’s personal information is highly important to Roland.

“A VM backup solution should be reliable, easy to administer, and provide fast backup and short recovery times,” he says.

However, the previous VM backup solution used by Radisson Park Inn failed to meet these requirements.

“Our previous VM backup product was giving us a lot of problems. It was constantly crashing, and we had to spend a lot of time to bring it back to life. But its biggest issue was the amount of storage it needed to perform backups. We needed a better VM backup solution which would be stable and which would not take a lot of storage space” says Roland.

That is why, Roland began looking for a replacement to their existing VM backup solution that would meet the company’s requirements.

Backup & Replication was recommended to Roland by Telegrupp AS, system integrator and IT solution provider in Estonia that specializes in providing a range of IT services and products.

First off, Roland was impressed with the ease of deployment of the product.

“We installed and configured Nakivo Backup & Replication within minutes. All required components – like the database – were already there, all features worked out the box, and we did not have to deploy any agents,” says Roland.

Furthermore, Backup & Replication features a simple and intuitive Web interface to reduce backup administration complexity.

“In comparison to our past VM backup solution, Nakivo Backup & Replication proved to be simpler and more flexible,” says Roland. “Setting up new backup jobs was a breeze.“

Built for virtualization, Backup & Replication uses native VMware APIs and relies on architecture optimized for performance to deliver highest VM backup speeds.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication completed VM backup jobs faster than our previous backup solution,” says Roland.

After running a number of backup jobs, Roland has compared the size of VM backups created by Nakivo Backup & Replication to the size of backups created by their previous product.

“The amount of storage space reduction we got with Nakivo Backup & Replication’s was truly awesome. We achieved 3X reduction in storage space,” says Roland.

Backup & Replication automatically de-duplicates backed up data at the block level across entire backup repository and this reduces the size of VM backups. After data is deduplicated, the product compresses each data block so it occupies even less storage space in the backup repository.

In addition, to performance improvement and storage space reduction, Backup & Replication has also boosted VM recovery time.

“With the Flash VM Boot feature, we were able to recover entire VMs from backups in a matter of seconds,” says Roland.

Full VM recovery can be a very long and stressful process that can fail after hours of waiting and will have to be started over again. With the Flash VM Boot feature, VMs can be recovered within seconds by booting them directly from compressed and de-duplicated VM backups. Flash VM Boot works out of the box for all VM backups and does not require any special recovery environment.

After a long evaluation ad testing period, Roland was satisfied with Backup & Replication reliability as backup jobs ran successfully and the product did not crash or need any administration.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication turned out to be perfect for us: the product proved to deliver fast and reliable VM backups, saved storage space with deduplication and compression, and improved VM recovery time,” says Roland.

Radisson Park Inn hotel uses Backup & Replication to protect and recover their business-critical VMware VMs.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication proved to be superior to our previous VM backup solution,” says Roland.

Due to data deduplication and compression, Radisson Park Inn Hotel has reduced backup storage space by 3X.

“We have also improved our recovery time as we can now near-instantly recover VMs directly from the backup repository \with Flash VM Boot,” says Roland.