Nakivo Helps China Airlines Recover VMs

Nakivo Inc. announced that China Airlines – an airline carrier in Asia- has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Established in 1959 in Taoyuan City, Taiwan, China Airlines is headquartered in Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport and has over 12,600 employees as of August 2016. The airline operates in 4 continents, 143 destinations in 29 countries/districts, and deploys 92 aircraft.

China Airlines’ IT infrastructure consists of two data centers.

“We have more than 60 VMware ESXi hosts and over 900 VMs. The VMs run our core applications, including our GPS system, Flight system, OA system, SQL, Exchange, and file servers, and other workloads,” says Stivan Chou, China Airlines’ representative.

At China Airlines, VMware VMs run both business-critical applications that are in charge of their daily operations and processes, and the airline’s website that provides customers with up to date information regarding flights, bookings, and check-in options.

“We have to keep our data safe because we are in the aviation industry. Data loss and downtime will impact our business, so in case of an emergency, we need to recover instantly,” says Chou.

“With our previous backup software, VM recovery was always longer than we expected. Moreover, this legacy product did not support the latest version of VMware, so when we upgraded our system to the newest version, we could not do backups. We urgently needed to find another solution that could handle our 900 VMware VMs, perform fast VM backup and recovery, and read data directly from disks, bypassing the network,” he added.

“We found Nakivo Backup & Replication online and were instantly intrigued by its rich feature set,” says Chou.

While Backup & Replication can be installed on Windows and Linux, deployment as a pre-configured Virtual Appliance offers an additional simplicity and efficiency.

“It was quite straightforward to import an OVA with Nakivo Backup & Replication appliance into our vSphere environment. We did not have to install and configure an OS. Nakivo Backup & Replication appliance saves time and does not require constant attention,” says Chou.

“It is imperative for us to save backup time because we have 900 VMs to deal with. Daily backups should be performed in 8 hours. After using Hot Add that reads data directly from source VM disks, bypassing the network, we were able to reduce backup times by about 10 hours weekly,” says Chou.

Backup & Replication uses Hot Add to offload production LAN from the data protection traffic and increases the VMware backup and recovery speed.

The Flash VM Boot feature provided additional time savings for China Airlines.

“VM recovery is way faster than with our previous backup solution. We use Flash VM Boot in emergency cases, and this feature has already saved us 2 hours of downtime,” says Chou.

The Flash VM Boot feature enables China Airlines to boot VMs directly from compressed and deduplicated backups, eliminating the need to recover the entire VM first.

In addition to instant VM recovery, data deduplication provided storage space savings for China Airlines.

“Global data deduplication is another amazing feature. It reduced our storage space by about 60% and allows us to store more recovery points per VM backup. In addition, we were able to save money on direct storage costs and other costs, such as maintenance,” says Chou.

Nakivo Backup & Replication deduplicates VM backups at the block level and saves only unique data to the backup repository.

With Backup & Replication, China Airlines performs VM backups every day. The company has reduced the backup time by 10 hours weekly with the Hot Add feature. Due to Instant VM Recovery, China Airlines achieved near-instant VM recovery and also reduced storage space by 60% with data deduplication.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication is an outstanding product that offers great features and does not break the budget. The product saved management time by 35% and reduced our VMware backup budget by 30%,” concluded Chou.