Dutch Telco KPN Selects Nakivo Backup & Replication

Nakivo Inc. announced that KPN N.V. has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their environment.

KPN started as a public telecommunications company with HQs in Rotterdam, Netherlands. It is a telecommunication and ICT service provider that offers telephone, mobile telephone, Internet and television services to the consumer market. For the corporate market, it offers complete telecommunication and ICT solutions. In addition, It offers wholesale network services for other operators around the world.

Its managed networking IT infrastructure consists of 3 sites with 15 physical servers and 100 VMs. Information stored in the VMs is mainly data and applications for network management. It includes SQL databases, applications for network tooling, security tooling, database tooling and authentication tooling.

Its managed networking department is responsible for the corporate market. It manages the networks of KPN’s top 100 corporate customers. The department’s main priority is to ensure that all the tooling applications are up and running on a day-to-day basis. Moreover, the ability to recover a complete VM near instantly if a server crashes is crucial for the department. Ensuring continuous availability of services for the top corporate customers is of utmost importance.

Until a few years ago, KPN only had physical servers and used tape backup software. The company was backing up its data from the physical servers to tape cartridges. One of the main disadvantages of backup to tape is that backup and recovery operations are time-consuming. Moreover, backup to tape proved to be a more expensive option than it first appeared. Tape cartridges must be purchased regularly, not to mention the ongoing costs associated with software management.

When KPN decided to virtualize its physical servers, tape backup software became obsolete as it did not include the functionality of backing up VMs. The firm also changed how it stores its data, moving it from tape to storage servers.

When KPN was transitioning from physical servers to VMs, the need arose for a VM backup solution that was designed for virtualized environments. Nakivo Backup & Replication was recommended to KPN by Pieter Simhoffer, a technical administrator at KPN managed networking department. he was already using Nakivo in his home lab for backing up VMs. Being familiar with the software, he knew that the software offered all the functionality the company needed at an attractive price. It was cost-effective with a set of features that includes VM backup, VM replication, VM recovery, backup copy, backup to cloud and even native backup to tape.

“It was easy to install and configure Backup & Replication, especially with the straightforward support guide. The website is also easy to navigate and keeps improving with every new product version,” says Simhoffer. “With Backup & Replication, we have a stable environment, even though we only take advantage of the product’s core functionality and do not use its fullest potential. What KPN needs is scheduled backups that finish successfully and occasional VM restores.“

With the VM backup functionality of the Nakivo solution, KPN can perform an initial full VM backup and subsequent incremental backups. Currently, the company backups its VMs to Dell storage servers.

“We schedule backup jobs on a daily and weekly basis. Understandably, an initial full backup always takes a long time to complete, but our daily 55 incremental backups take approximately 5 hours. This is obviously much faster than backing up to tape. In addition, global data deduplication saves us a ton of storage space, plus time spent on backing up VMs as well,” says Simhoffer

Finally, the Nakivo solution allows KPN to recover entire VMs, as well as files, when needed. Instant VM Recovery boots VMs directly from compressed and deduplicated backups, so that it can recover VMs in a matter of minutes.

“Instant VM recovery helps us save time because we can recover a complete VM. We’ve only used the Instant File Recovery feature once, but it saved hours for a user when we had to use it,” says Simhoffer.

With Nakivo, KPN has reliable data protection with flexible functionality and saves resources. Incremental VM backup allows to complete 55 backup jobs daily in 5 hours. The data deduplication saves the company storage space. While with instant VM recovery, the user can recover complete VMs from compressed and deduplicated backups.

“After switching to Backup & Replication, we are finally able to backup our VMs reliably with improved backup speed. We no longer need to change tapes; thus, we’ve freed up at least an hour every day with Backup & Replication,” says Simhoffer.