Greater Grace International School in Hungary Selects Nakivo Backup & Replication

Greater Grace International School has selected Nakivo Backup & Replication to protect their environment.

It is an international, private school located in Budapest, Hungary. It was established in 1991 and grew from one classroom to over 200 students. Representing about 30 nationalities, the school prepares students for colleges and universities all over the world.

Istvan Pirger is an IT and facility manager who has been with the school since 2000. He is responsible for managing the IT infrastructure of the school.

The school has 2 buildings on campus with one ESXi server and a Synology NAS server each. Istvan manages around 10 VMs that contain financial and business data about the school. Other VMs store Windows servers, printer servers, an electric door opening system, a PBX phone system, and a custom student content management system.

“Four years ago, our only server crashed, and everyone had to work on paper for a week or two before I was able to buy and configure a new server. This situation proved to our management that data protection is vital and investing in hardware and backup software is key to keeping data safe. When things are running smoothly, no one notices what happens in the background. Only when something drastic happens then things begin to change,” says Pirger.

Due to the gravity of that crash, the school reevaluated priorities and decided to virtualize their environment and invest in new hardware and software. Previously, backups were done with a free backup software that had multiple disadvantages.

“New files and folders were created and then got lost, the disk space filled up quickly, the software sometimes did not backup the data at all or the admin sometimes forgot to update the changes in the backup software. Recovery was always a problem. When the server crashed, we just got lucky that the data stayed intact,” says Istvan.

One of his former IT colleagues recommended Backup & Replication as a possible backup solution for the school.

“We needed automated backup software that was built specifically for virtualized environments – a product that would do backups every day and successfully. I believe we truly selected the best possible product for us,” says Istvan. “With Backup & Replication, I like that full servers can be backed up or replicated. If the servers crash, they do not need a full reinstall. Previously, we had to reinstall servers, remember all the settings, restore the file backups, and sometimes compromise if the reinstall did not work out the way we expected. I enjoy the fact that Backup & Replication is fully automated and how fast the software switches to a VM replica. We have financial software that requires manual tasks and has been a pain, while Backup & Replication works with ease and does not require constant monitoring.“

The school does backup and replication jobs overnight. As anything can happen with the school’s hardware, the IT team can replicate VMs to a second building and switch on a VM replica when needed.

“If anything goes wrong with the source VM, I can turn on the VM replica ins. I can also switch back to an earlier version of the VM. I really appreciate this automated approach. We have a PBX phone VM that sometimes crashes for some reason. With Backup & Replication, we can recover this VM to previous recovery points and have the system running again. I’m not sure how else I would solve this problem because we are not experts in the phone system. Other than that, sometimes someone accidentally deletes a file and we can restore that ins. It’s truly brilliant. I don’t know if we could have continued with the previous software, in the long run, as the software was pretty much outdated. We did not spend much money on our previous software. Our server crashed and we almost lost our precious data. Thus, from a cheap solution, we went to the state-of-the-art Backup & Replication. The school’s daily operations are running smoothly and data used by students, faculty, and staff is protected,” says Istvan.