Czech Environmental Information Agency Selecting Nakivo

Nakivo Inc. that Czech Environmental Information Agency (CENIA) has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

CENIA is a state consultancy company under the Ministry of Environment of Czech Republic. It collects and administers environmental data for the Czech Republic and provides independent environmental information in the economic and social context. Their main mission is to provide environment assessment and expected development of the state of the environment in the context of national trends and global mega-trends.

CENIA’s VMware VMs store anti-spam, Lotus Domino mail and application server, accounting, WSUS, application server, and a web server.

“Any issues with the virtual infrastructure can have a direct impact on CENIA’s services (it is especially critical to have a recent backup of the accounting and shared data). That is why a backup solution is a vital component of maintaining our 24/7 availability,” says Petr Šmídek, ICT administrator, CENIA.

By using custom scripts as a method of data protection, failed jobs, as well as long backup time were a common occurrence at CENIA.

“I noticed that it took a whole weekend for the previous solution to backup a VM with 1TB of data. In addition, the storage space was expanding rapidly. Basically, we decided to evaluate other available solutions on the market to ensure fast and consistent VM backups, and also offered reliable deduplication and compression,” says Šmídek.

exTerra Services s.r.o. introduced Backup & Replication to CENIA as a possible solution to problems with VM backup speed and increasing storage space.

“Initially, I was pleasantly surprised with how easy and intuitive the product is, appreciated the simplicity and clarity of the web interface, and also the fact that it does not overload the servers. We installed Nakivo Backup & Replication on Ubuntu Linux by running a single command and started to perform VM backups to our NAS,” says Šmídek.

With Backup & Replication, VM backup speed improved.

“I attribute this change to VMware CBT technology that enabled us to finally have incremental backup jobs. With VMware CBT technology, VM backup time is reduced,” says Šmídek.

Another option that Šmídek appreciates is the ability to create recovery points in the backup repository for each VM. With Backup & Replication there is an ability to save up to 1,000 recovery points per VM backup.

Due to data deduplication, VM storage space decreased.

“Deduplication is strong and we were able to decrease storage space by 50%. Previously, our storage was swamped with huge backups, but now with deduplication, we have more efficient disk space utilization and can store more recovery points per VM. Lastly, we tried instant VM recovery and instant file recovery and both features work to our complete satisfaction and would be life savers in a disaster situation,” says Šmídek.

Backup & Replication provides CENIA with 2X faster VM backup speed and VM backup storage savings.

“Finally, VM backups finish correctly and do not require days of work. On average, I was able to save 5 hours per month of my own time that was previously spent on checking and controlling VM backups. With Nakivo Backup & Replication, I just get an email and I can see that VM backups finish successfully. With deduplication, we were able to decrease storage space by at least 50%. Backup & Replication solution delivers high performance and real-time alerts to ensure CENIA’s success,” says Šmídek.