Zambia Daily Mail Customer of Nakivo Backup & Replication

Nakivo Inc. announced that Zambia Daily Mail has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their environment.

Zambia Daily Mail is an English-language daily newspaper published in Zambia. The newspaper covers general news, business news, sport news, and other current topics.

The newspaper’s IT infrastructure is made up of 12 physical servers and over 30 VMs running databases, custom news management and publication software, news files, and advertising materials.

The company runs mission-critical applications that operate 24/7. Backup and replication are essential to meet BC objectives. The newspaper aims to minimize disruption to the business by avoiding any detrimental impact on its data. Ensuring replicated systems are on standby is vital in order to provide resilience in the event of a crisis.

Previously, Zambia Daily Mail relied on open-source software for backups, which was resource-intensive and slow in data restorations. This impacted the business negatively, as there was no restoration of granular files, making the file restoration and data integrity testing procedures cumbersome. Reconfigurations were performed on a daily basis just to ensure data was recoverable.

Zambia Daily Mail started to look for a solution that was not resource-intensive and did not demand day-to-day monitoring or checkups to confirm that it was working properly. It needed a robust and easy-to-configure solution for both their physical servers and VMs.

During the evaluation process of 8 backup solutions, it found that Backup & Replication proved to be lightweight and fast in executing backups. Agentless deployment meant that Zambia Daily Mail could target any of their available infrastructure for replication. The licensing costs proved to be manageable in comparison to the other solutions on the market, which have complex licensing contracts with hidden charges.

“We installed Backup & Replication on a standalone physical server, which is in isolation from all the main infrastructure. Installation was seamless, as everything was completed within 10mn, with all configurations in place. Repositories are easy to add with notifications that are sent on time,” says Emmanuel Kalenge senior ICT engineer, Zambia Daily Mail.

“On average, we need 6 to 8 hours for full backups and about 2 hours for incremental backups of our critical data. Support for multiple repositories that can point to different storage silos is a big plus for us, as well as excellent memory management by the backup solution. We no longer need to spend hours monitoring backups, as everything is pretty much automated,” he added.

“With VM backup, we have observed a 40% increase in backup speed for our VMs, even on a network that is slow in speed. While granular instant recovery proved useful in the event of restoring specific files that are misplaced or lost by our field reporters and editors,” he says. “Technical support has been excellent and available through the onsite chat that does not need a call. Our team can remotely log in the chat and address issues directly, thus saving us time.“

“Overall, we can estimate about $500,000 savings in time and bandwidth costs for a period of 3 years while using Backup & Replication. The software rarely requires our attention and generates detailed daily reports for our records. We achieved faster file recoveries with granular instant recovery, as well as faster VM replication. In addition, we have been able to efficiently plan our storage requirements and ensure our Capex is within approved limits. This has impacted performance in that we can channel more resources to other sectors of the business,” he concluded.