South Tyrol Museum of Archeology Customer of Nakivo Backup and Replication

Nakivo, Inc. announced that South Tyrol Museum of Archeology has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their environment.

The museum is dedicated entirely to Ötzi, or the Iceman, a human mummy more than 5,000 years old. The Ötzi exhibition is housed on the 2 floors of the museum and displays everything of interest about the most famous glacier mummy.

The exhibition covers the circumstances surrounding Ötzi’s accidental discovery on September 19, 1991, the international media response, the original finds themselves (the mummy together with its clothing and equipment), daily life in the Copper Age, and multidisciplinary research.

The museum has one site in Bolzano, Italy, and their IT infrastructure consists of 2 physical servers and 10 VMs. The VMs store all data necessary for the museum’s daily operations. In addition, Microsoft Office applications, a SQL database, a remote desktop server, financial management applications, applications for booking museum visits, and infrastructure management applications are also virtualized and stored in the VMs.

For the museum, data preservation is the priority. Data loss or downtime could lead to the temporary closure of the museum, with a financial impact and repercussions in the media.

Previously, it relied on backup to tape with another vendor. Backup to tape was a outdated method that required frequent changes of tapes, limited capacity, and long recovery times. Moreover, the whole process was difficult to manage. The museum started looking for a data protection solution designed for virtualized environments. The museum’s main requirements were greater flexibility and ease of use. The museum’s technical partner recommended Backup & Replication, and the software fully satisfied the museum’s criteria.

The Nakivo data protection solution is designed for virtualized environments running on VMware, Hyper-V, or Amazon EC2. It keeps IT running and data safe at a fraction of the cost in comparison with the other vendors.

The solution is worth the switch given the “one product” principle, where the product covers all needs in terms of backup, replication, and recovery. The organization appreciates Nakivo due to easy configuration and reliability in day-to-day IT operations.

“The software installation and configuration are extremely easy, while the web user interface is clearly laid out and warnings are well presented. Currently, Nakivo Backup & Replication is installed as a virtual server on a host. The backup takes place on a Qnap NAS and local HDDs,” says Andrea Battagin, Museum system administrator.

Nakivo ensures that VMs, data, and applications are recoverable within minutes. With VM backup, one can create image-based, incremental, application-aware backups of VMs. Backup jobs can also be automated with various backup policies in order to save time and effort. The product also sends error and warning email notifications and reports via email.

“Currently, the whole backup process of our entire infrastructure takes two hours. We perform backup on a daily basis. I like the level of detail that I receive in the email notifications, as detailed information is important to me,” says Battagin.

Recovery was a laborious and time-consuming process when the museum was relying on backup to tape. With Nakivo, VM recovery is easier.

“Backup & Replication can recover entire VMs from deduplicated backups in a matter of minutes. The possibility of being able to recover a VM in dark times is priceless. Only those who’ve had to find themselves in unpleasant situations can understand that quick recovery is a total relief,” says Battagin.

Nakivo provides South Tyrol Museum of Archeology with reliable VM backup, detailed notifications and reports received via email, and improved VM recovery. The support team can be reached quickly and all issues or questions can be resolved. VM recovery is near-instant in comparison to the past approach, where recovery was a tedious process.

“When we switched to Backup & Replication, the work of our IT team became smoother and easier. We definitely saved time on backup management as well. For now, I could not quantify the amount of money saved with Backup & Replication, and our peace of mind is priceless,” says Battagin.