Compton Unified School District Shortens VM Backup “by 6X” With Nakivo and Synology

Nakivo Inc. announced that the Compton Unified School District (CUSD) has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their Hyper-V environment.

The CUSD is an educational organization located in the south-central region of Los Angeles County, CA. The district encompasses the city of Compton, parts of the cities of Carson and Los Angeles. It currently serves nearly 26,000 students across 40 sites: 36 schools and 4 administration offices.

CUSD’s IT infrastructure consists of eight physical hosts split between two clusters running 80 Hyper-V VMs. The VMs include file servers, database servers, domain controllers, and application servers, such as Exchange 2013. For an educational organization, VM backup, replication, and recovery is important, but also required by law. CUSD stores years of student information, including attendance data, grades, as well as proof of graduation, it is required by law to keep these records safe and accessible by students well after their graduation.

Previously, CUSD used a different backup solution that required agents to be installed on every guest server.

“The previous solution had unrealistic backup windows and demanded excessive administration time. The product was also complex, had a steep learning curve, and required us to allocate additional time for staff training. Furthermore, the licensing for that solution posed a financial hardship for us. That’s why we started seeking a user-friendly and easy-to-deploy VM backup solution. The solution had to be robust and cost-effective, while offering low administrative overhead,” says Tony Burrus, CTO, CUSD.

CUSD discovered Backup & Replication when Gabriel Barrientos, network administrator, CUSD, found Backup & Replication available in the Synology, Inc.‘s Package Center. Installing Backup & Replication on a NAS creates a performing VM backup appliance, which uses the NAS CPU and RAM to perform VM backups and the available NAS storage to save VM backups. Because the VM backups can be written directly to disk and don’t have to travel over the network, VM backup speed can be increased.

CUSD decided to put Backup & Replication to the test.

“Installing and configuring Nakivo Backup & Replication was nothing like we’ve experienced with any other VM backup solution. We now have the product installed on a Synology DS1817 and also use a Synology DS916+ as an offsite backup copy destination. The integration of Synology NAS servers and Nakivo Backup & Replication allowed us to reach our objectives, while saving thousands of dollars, by reusing existing hardware,” says Barrientos.

Backup & Replication provides VM backup functionality that lets CUSD backup Hyper-V VMs in less time than the district’s previous backup solution. Inevitably, some time is needed to perform an initial backup of over 8TB of data, regardless of the backup solution. However, once the initial backup was completed, the backup windows for all Hyper-V VMs were reduced from over 12 hours (with the previous backup solution), to just two hours.

Previously, CUSD used the native Hyper-V VM replication functionality, however, VM replication often failed and, as is typical for built-in systems, that solution did not provide appropriate email notifications for failed VM replication jobs. Therefore, CUSD could not rely on the built-in replication solution for offsite DR. Backup & Replication allows CUSD to maintain a DR site with ease, without saturating WAN links.

In terms of recovery features, instant file recovery is one of the most useful Backup & Replication features for CUSD because the software can recover files directly from VM backups, without needing to recover the entire VM first.

“Instant file recovery saves us time and resources. Accidental file deletions occur often, and with instant file recovery, lost files can be recovered in a couple of clicks,” says Barrientos.

Backup & Replication installed on Synology NAS provides CUSD with the ability to backup and replicate their Hyper-V VMs and recover files from Hyper-V VM backups. With the VM backup feature, CUSD shortened their backup job times by 6X, from 12 hours to 2 hours, while with the VM replication feature, they were able to improve the success rate of VM replication jobs. Thanks to instant file recovery, all files and folders can be recovered directly from Hyper-V VM backups in minutes.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication has saved CUSD a tremendous amount of time and money. Nakivo Backup & Replication provided CUSD with a robust and cost-effective VM backup solution for protecting our virtual environment,” says Barrientos.