AsiaPac International University in Thailand Backuping VMs 15X Faster With Nakivo

Nakivo Inc. announced that AsiaPac International University has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

AsiaPac International University is a private university located in Thailand, which is committed to being an international, values-oriented educational community for the advancement of learning and knowledge, which develops and nurtures in its students, faculty and staff.

The IT infrastructure at the university is virtualized and runs on VMware. With over 1,000 students, not including faculty and staff, it needs to protect its IT systems and data, and also provide IT services to all the stakeholders. In addition, it also needs to protect a proprietary information system, VMs running Windows servers and file servers.

“Before completely virtualizing our environment, we had physical servers and we were backing up those servers with a legacy server backup software. While that software was working fine at the beginning, the backup time was longer than we hoped it would be. When one server went down that was holding 100GB of data, the recovery process took the whole night, from the evening till the morning time, and did not even finish successfully after all. We had no guarantee that we would be able to recover any of our servers in the future, unless I stayed up all night and monitored the progress of the recovery process, so we decided to invest in virtualization. When we finally virtualized our environment, we started our search for a VM backup solution that would be able to backup, replicate, and recover our VMware VMs quickly and reliably,” says Edwardson A. Pedragosa Jr., network administrator, AsiaPac International University.

With a specific budget in mind, due to being an educational institution, the university first trialed Backup & Replication for 30 days and after receiving the green light from the university’s director of IT, the software was purchased to protect the virtual environment.

Since the university already had two Synology NAS DS3615XS servers at the premises, the additional benefit of creating a VM backup appliance by installing Backup & Replication on a Synology NAS was appreciated.

“After installing the software on a Synology NAS, I have greatly reduced my personal time on backup administration. Due to the intuitive web interface, I schedule the jobs and just leave them and only check the notifications that I receive by email. With an all-in-one VM backup appliance, we managed to free up resources for other specific IT needs,” says Edwardson.

With Backup & Replication, file servers are backed up every six hours, while other critical servers are backed up every hour.

“We are extremely pleased with the backup speed that Nakivo and Synology offer because some backup jobs take only seconds to complete. If to compare to our previous legacy backup solution, the speed increased by at least 15X because previously, backup for the most time-consuming server would have taken 15 minutes to finish, while now only one minute, with CBT enabled,” says Edwardson.

Previously, backup was occupying a significant amount of storage space and regular checkups were required to ensure enough space was available. By switching to Backup & Replication, the university does not have to worry about saving VM storage space, due to data deduplication, compression, and skip swap files.

VM replication is used for one of the most critical servers at the university, which is the student information server database.

“By creating a copy of the source VM on a target ESXi host, we achieved the ability to fail over from the source VM to the VM replica. With VM replication, if for any reason, the main server would go down, I can automatically power on the VM replica.” says Edwardson.

Backup & Replication installed on Synology NAS, provides AsiaPac International University with a 15X improvement in VM backup speed, in comparison to their previous legacy backup software. Due to skip swap files, data deduplication, and compression, the university can no longer worry about increasing VM storage space. In addition, with VM replication, the university can minimize the risk of data loss and downtime by creating an exact copy of a source VM and powering it on during a disaster.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication is a cost-effective VM backup solution that provides great features at a reasonable price. With Nakivo Backup & Replication, the university saved time, money, and gained peace of mind, while I now spend the majority of my time not on backup administration, but on other IT related tasks,” says Edwardson.