Russell Sage College in New York Chooses Nakivo

Nakivo Inc. announced that Russell Sage College has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their environment.

Russell Sage College is a co-ed college with 2 campuses located in Albany and Troy, NY, USA. It offers a range of undergraduate and graduate degrees along with several certificate programs. Margaret Slocum Sage founded the college in 1916 and named the college after her husband Russell Sage.

At Russell Sage College, there are 2 sites – one located in Albany and the other located in Troy – with 12 physical hosts and approximately 263 VMs. The VMs store student and staff personal data, historical data, and images. When it comes to applications, some of the VMs act as domain controllers and run monitoring software, imaging and bootstrapping applications, the online learning platform, among other uses.

As an educational institution, the college deals with a huge amount of student data that needs to be backed up and recovered in a timely manner, especially the online learning platform and information management systems on the department’s servers, which handle critical student and staffing information. In order to achieve an uninterrupted teaching experience for some students 2,500 undergraduate and graduate students, the college always looks for new ways to safeguard critical data with reliable products.

Previously, the college protected critical data with another VM backup product. As that product became too expensive to maintain for the college, and adding extra DR functionalities was completely out of the IT team’s budget, the school was on the lookout for a new VM backup solution.

Currently, it relies on Nakivo to ensure that students, staff, and teachers have uninterrupted access to all their data and systems. The college selected Backup & Replication due to the product’s flexible pricing, ease of installation and setup, and DR functionalities.

“The installation and setup were flawless compared to the other solutions. We were up and running in about 10mn or less. The web interface is easy to navigate and user-friendly,” says Zaheer Ahmad, network administrator, Russell Sage College. “We installed Backup & Replication on a VM, but the product offers a variety of installation options that we can use in the future.“

Backup & Replication allows organizations to use backup repositories that support immutability to prevent backup data encryption or corruption. Immutability eliminates the risk of accidental or intentional deletions.

“The ability to easily deploy Transporters and add backup storage is amazing. One of our favorite features is the ability to make the backups immutable, without extra steps. An immutable storage option was not available with the previous solution unless we paid extra,” says Ahmad.

In terms of DR, Backup & Replication provides site recovery functionality for maintaining operations at a secondary site. This functionality ensures DR planning and swift failover/failback without data loss.

“Since we have 2 separate sites, DR planning for emergency purposes is the number one priority. We can recover VMs in minutes, easily create VM replicas, and perform DR testing,” says Ahmad.

Backup & Replication protects critical data at Russell Sage College while helping preserve the work of both faculty and students. As it protects vs. data loss, the college can facilitate learning and research services as well. With immutable backups, the college is protected vs. cyberattacks and ransomware.

“Backup & Replication saved us $15,000 when we switched from the previous solution. Nakivo’s technical support has also been phenomenal. They provide quick and helpful responses and solutions to all of our issues and they follow up often, so you never miss a response. The IT team also saved valuable time due to the product’s user-friendly interface and agentless technology,” says Ahmad.

Case study: Nakivo Helps a College in NY Save $15,000 in Backup Costs