Columbia Nephrology Selects Nakivo Backup & Replication

Columbia Nephrology, a medical practice for kidney disease, has selected Nakivo Backup & Replication to protect their environment.

The customer consists of a group of healthcare providers, who are dedicated to delivering care to patients. It has 5 locations, 21 physicians, and 24+ affiliations. All physicians are considered to be experts on kidney conditions throughout the greater Columbia area, South Carolina.

Physicians visit patients, provide dialysis, train medical residents, and provide consulting to staff.

The practice has 3 main locations and 2 satellite locations across the Midlands of South Carolina. All servers are virtualized, and there are currently 40 VMs. These machines consist of Microsoft Active Directory servers, domain controllers, proxy servers, and other servers.

The practice’s most critical data is an electronic health records system and a practice management software that contain all patient’s information. The ability to care for the patients is crucial, and having a stable backup system is key. Having reliable backups, a stable replication process, and fast recoveries allows physicians to care for their patients without any interruptions. In the event of a disaster, knowing that all data can be recovered in a matter of minutes is essential for the patient care.

Previously, Columbia Nephrology relied on another solution for protecting their critical data, but the solution was not meeting the practice’s needs. Often, backup jobs would fail for different reasons, and backups could hang for a long time. More time was spent on troubleshooting failed backup jobs than on basic maintenance of the backup jobs. This caused frustration among the IT team and prevented them from getting their other daily tasks done. Larger backups also took several hours to recover, and this caused workflow issues that the practice could not tolerate.

Some of the features were not needed and were wasted in the practice’s environment. The practice started to look at other solutions, but the pricing models did not always fit their needs. The main criteria were a backup solution that delivered on its promises.

After researching several backup solutions and viewing numerous demos, Columbia Nephrology decided that Backup & Replication was what it needed. The simple workflow of scheduling a backup, the ability to select a storage device, and a fair pricing model made this solution the best option.

Nakivo provides data protection for virtual, physical, cloud, and SaaS environments. The solution also offers flexibility in terms of installation and configuration, with installation on Windows/Linux, deployment as a pre-configured virtual appliance, or installation on a NAS server.

“The installation process is extremely straightforward, as it took us only a minute to configure the software with Active Directory. The web-interface is laid out in a user-friendly way, and the dashboard gives a complete overview of the backup environment from completed backup jobs to backup speeds and data size transfers. Currently, we are using Data Domain storage for our backups with Backup & Replication. Later this year, we will also be installing Backup & Replication on a Qnap NAS,” says Ray Gilliam.

“We only backup our VMs and perform full and incremental backups every night for our entire infrastructure. The whole process gets completed in nearly eight hours. Once the backup jobs are created and scheduled, we seldomly ever have to reconfigure them. This makes administration easier, allowing us to have more time to spend on other IT tasks, rather than on verifying backups and resolving alerts. Fortunately, we’ve not had to request support so far, as we did not have any major issues,” he says.

“The best functionality for us are the alarm alerts in the job information box. If issues with the backups occur, Backup & Replication provides additional information in the alerts that makes it easy for us to resolve those minor alerts. The knowledge base that we receive is clear, so we understand the issue and how to resolve that issue,” he says.

Columbia Nephrology also enjoys that the Nakivo solution integrates with Active Directory.

“Active Directory integration is an obvious time saver, not having to remember additional usernames and passwords is always a good thing. Overall, due to how easily Backup & Replication schedules backups and verifies backups, we see the product a keeper for the foreseeable future,” says Gilliam.

Nakivo allows Columbia Nephrology to schedule backup jobs and verify backups. The practice can backup their infrastructure with full and incremental backups and no longer has to deal with failed backup jobs. The IT team has more time to devote to other pressing issues rather than constantly monitor the solution. Due to alerts and the information in the alerts, the practice can resolve minor issues in the backup jobs, if they occur.

“Backup & Replication is about half the price of our previous solution, and about a fraction of the cost if you compare to the other solutions on the market. Thus, Backup & Replication saved us thousands on renewal cost alone. Pricing and the product’s ability to integrate with almost any storage system is the most appealing aspect about Backup & Replication,” says Gilliam.