Pražská Strojírna in Czech Republic Acquired Nakivo VM Backup Appliance

Nakivo Inc.announced that Pražská strojírna a.s., a rail structures manufacturer for tramways in Czech Republic, has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Established in 1994, Pražská strojírna develops and manufactures rail structures and turnout systems for tramways and serves customers across Europe, North America, and Africa. it has two locations in Prague, Czech Republic.

“Our IT infrastructure consists of 6 physical servers and 20 ESXi hosts across two different locations. Both locations are connected by LAN to provide DR, in case of an emergency situation at one location. VMware VMs store different kinds of data and applications, everything from DC, proxy, email, to SQL and CRM,” says Ondra Havlíček, ICT manager, Pražská strojírna.

“We wanted to ensure uninterrupted development and manufacturing of our products, that is why we invested in virtualization. VM backups help us guarantee continuous enterprise operations, and also proper circulation of materials. Moreover, the know-how about our products and services is stored in the VMware VMs,” says Ondra.

“The two previous backup solutions that we used were quite expensive, as well as they were lagging in terms of performance. VM backups were slow and required constant monitoring, and VM recovery tests took ages to complete. That is why we decided to contact our partner, exTerra Services, for a recommendation on a more reliable solution that would help us reach our goal of improving VM backup and recovery speed and maintaining copies of backups in two different locations,” says Ondra.

exTerra Services s.r.o. introduced Backup & Replication to Pražská strojírna as a possible solution to problems with VM backups and as a DR implementation.

“The installation was a part of the product introduction on the partner’s seminar and the simplicity of the solution was so unexpected that we agreed to a POC. After using the trial version, we decided to purchase Nakivo Backup & Replication because the software was easy to use, fast, and had the features that we needed,” says Ondra.

Installing Backup & Replication on their Synology NAS, Pražská strojírna created a VM backup appliance.

“With Nakivo Backup & Replication installed on Synology NAS, VM backups are so fast that we’re able to fully use the bandwidth available to the NAS,” says Ondra. “Moreover, Nakivo Backup & Replication can use all the space available on the device to store VM backups.“

“Since we have two locations, we wanted to protect our data and applications against unexpected disasters and VM failures, so by having not one, but multiple copies of backups, we wanted to ensure an extra level of safety. Backup copy enables us to quickly send copies of backups to both locations. Backup copies are consistent with the actual backup jobs and we can recover data from them, whenever we want,” says Ondra.

With Backup & Replication installed on Synology NAS, Pražská strojírna increased VM backup speed by 2X. The company is able to maintain copies of backups in two different locations.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication greatly simplified the way in which VM backups are done and dramatically increased backup speed, due to installation on Synology NAS. With the backup copy feature, we are now able to quickly move new backups to another location, without overloading the operating infrastructure and VMware VMs. Overall, with Nakivo Backup & Replication, we were able to save 70% of time on backup administration,” says Ondra.