South African Kenridge Primary School Opts for Nakivo

Nakivo Inc. announced that Kenridge Primary School, a South African elementary school, has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Established in the 1950s in Cape Town, South Africa, Kenridge Primary School teaches approximately 1,600 students from grades 1 through 7 and employs about 150 staff members. The school’s mission is to help all its students attain the optimal level of intellectual, cultural, and physical potential, by providing a warm, disciplined, and stimulating learning environment.

The IT infrastructure of Kenridge Primary School consists of one datacenter and four physical servers.

“Since we are a school, we have quite an abundance of information. The most critical VMware VM is our onsite mail server which holds about 300GB of mail. Another VM is our primary domain controller. Other VMs are used for file storage among other business critical applications,” says Devon Chandler, IT systems manager, Kenridge Primary School.

For the school, VM backup is important because a great deal of critical data needs to be backed up regularly and staff members must always have access to information for the day to day operations of the school.

“VM backup is crucial for our mail server and primary domain controller. Moreover, in the event of a crash or corruption, we need to quickly run full VM and object recovery,” says Devon.

Overall, reliable VM backups and fast VM recovery are imperative.

“With our previous backup solution, backup jobs would fail regularly. Generally, backups would take a long time to complete and often copy at a slow rate. This was unacceptable because we were constantly checking to see if backups had completed and we were spending too much time on IT administration,” says Devon.

Moreover, the user interface of the past backup solution was quite cumbersome and outdated.

“The user interface was over complicated. It was annoying that some services would stop without any warning or alerts,” says Devon.

Lastly, due to the size of VM backups, the recovery process took too long.

“If one of the files or objects was corrupt or missing, the recovery process always stood a chance of failing. Also, we missed not having an option to recover an entire VM. This was a huge disadvantage,” says Devon. “I heard about Nakivo Backup & Replication from my cousin that has been in the IT industry for many years. He was impressed by Nakivo’s deduplication and compression which immediately captured my attention.”

After testing, Kenridge Primary School decided to switch to Backup & Replication because the product covered all business needs and was the best next step forward. Their first impression about the installation and configuration of Backup & Replication was positive.

“This was one of the easiest setups I have ever done. The initial setup of the backup jobs took only a few minutes and once it connected to VMware vCenter, all the VMs are already there. It was fantastic! The web interface is also a dream to work with. Everything is laid out in a simple, yet effective manner,” says Devon.

Instant Object Recovery for Microsoft Exchange is vitally important to the school because their onsite mail server holds approximately 300GB of mail.

“It is extremely quick and easy to find and recover objects, whereas before, it took much longer to launch the recovery and find specific objects to recover,” says Devon.

Backup & Replication enables the ability to browse, search, and recover emails from compressed and deduplicated VMware VM backups, without the need to restore the entire VM first.

“Exchange Truncation is another nice feature that we use,” says Devon.

Over time, log files accumulate and can consume all of the available disk space, if not periodically removed. Backup & Replication provides the option to truncate Exchange Server logs on the source VMs after job completion.

In addition to instant object recovery, screenshot verification saved significant labor time for Kenridge Primary School.

“Screenshot verification is one of the best features Nakivo Backup & Replication offers and we use it for all our VM backups. The fact that the product sends mail alerts is fantastic. This way, I know immediately if something is wrong, or if a backup has completed successfully. The fact that a VM boots and you can see a screenshot, verifies that the VM backup was perfectly successful. No time needs to be spent manually booting the backed up VM,” says Devon.

For Kenridge Primary School, implementing Backup & Replication proved to be the right decision for the school. Previously, there were many problems with reliability and the speed at which backup jobs ran, but with Backup & Replication, backups run reliably every time.

“The ease at which backups can be set up is a definite winner. The cost in labor hours has decreased dramatically and with screenshot verification, we always receive notifications if anything goes wrong. We were able to save 4 hours per week on average. Overall, it is about 60% savings on IT administration time,” says Devon.

“The fact that we can recover application objects and entire VMs in minutes is superb,” says Devon. “With Nakivo Backup & Replication, we not only saved a significant amount of time, but also gained an all-in-one solution that requires minimal maintenance.”