Lakes Grammar School in Australia Chooses Nakivo Backup & Replication

Lakes Grammar, a primary and secondary school in Australia, has selected Nakivo Backup & Replication to protect their environment.

It is an independent co-educational Christian school, providing a broad education for students from kindergarten to grade 12. It emphasizes the development of intellectual quality in a supportive learning environment and encourages students to adopt a personal Christian faith as the foundation for living. Offering a range of sporting, cultural, and other co-curricular opportunities, it aims to meet the needs of students in a secure, caring, supportive Christian community.

It has one main campus with multiple buildings and 3 physical hosts with 30+ VMs running in its environment. VMs store SQL, file servers, mail servers, and other services running on both Windows and Linux OSs. A reliable backup solution is vital for BC and maintaining data availability. If critical data becomes unavailable, the school risks disrupting their services for students, as teachers will not be able to access the files they need to teach.

Initially, it was backing up to disk. This remained their procedure after they moved to a VMware backup solution. Later, it migrated its environment from VMware to Nutanix, and they decided to change their backup solution, as well. Other solutions on the market had particular Nutanix version requirements put in place, which was an issue for the school. The main criteria for any new solution were ease-of-use, low implementation costs, and the compatibility of the product with their current backup storage. Backup & Replication was easy to set up and implement and provided all the functionality for the school from the start.

Backup & Replication provides data protection for virtual, physical, cloud, and SaaS environments and offers fast and reliable data protection for Nutanix AHV environments, as well as for VMware and Hyper-V. It integrates into Nutanix AHV environments and provides agentless, application-aware, and incremental VM backup. You can streamline data protection routines, save time, reduce costs, and optimize the use of IT resources.

“Backup & Replication was simple to set up and has efficient storage of backup data on our Qnap Systems, Inc.‘s storage. In reality, you always take a keen interest in your backups, however, our experience has been very much different – a set it and forget it approach. Installing and configuring Backup & Replication could not have been easier. As soon as the VM was added into our Nutanix environment, everything from that point was configured from the web interface,” says Brett MacLarty, IT manager, Lakes Grammar.

Nakivo uses native change tracking technology – Nutanix changed regions tracking – to identify and backup only unique data blocks and thus save storage space. Moreover, LAN-free data transfer and network acceleration improve backup performance and reduce backup time.

“We backup on a daily basis and the entire backup takes approximately 50 minutes. Ease of use for the backup and recovery jobs is fantastic. Information and alerts from Nakivo Backup & Replication are easy to action, with plenty of support information available from within the console. Overall, there have been so few issues that we have not contacted support, Ease of use and simplicity is what we like most about Backup & Replication. Our Nutanix environment is reliably protected with the solution. Migrating our previous solution to support Nutanix quickly became cost prohibitive for the school. The initial savings of switching to Backup & Replication was 60%, with an ongoing maintenance savings of 50% each year. Backup & Replication will continue backing up our new VMs in our Nutanix environment, as our environment changes,” says MacLarty.