Nakivo Increases VM Backup Speed “by 10X” for Town of Kentville in Nova Scotia, Canada

Nakivo, Inc. announced that the town of Kentville has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Kentville is a town in Kings County, Nova Scotia, Canada. Its IT infrastructure consists of two sites that serve approximately 60 to 70 users. Several ESXi hosts hold VMware VMs at their main site in the Town Hall. The VMs store the town’s financial system (billing and accounts receivable), SQL servers, Exchange servers, a domain controller, a file server, and a small web server.

If any type of disaster occurs that could shut down the town’s IT infrastructure, they would essentially be unable to deliver public services to citizens and visitors in a timely manner. The citizens would not be able to make payments, while billing services could be frozen, and the town’s website could be affected too.

“Originally, we were using a different backup product that came up with VM data protection only a year ago, so naturally, I experienced several issues with that product. The bottom line was that it was cumbersome and expensive. Moreover, I experienced some support issues. On top of that, the backup speed was slow and it never really attained the level of performance I was hoping for. Therefore, as the government budget for municipalities is very strict, I wanted to find a VM backup solution that would be fast, stable, user-friendly, and affordable. In addition, I really wanted to take advantage of the hardware that we had already in place – our Synology NAS units,” says Jason Bethune, IT manager, town of Kentville.

Bethune’s colleague had recommended that he evaluates Backup & Replication due to the product’s ability to integrate with Synology NAS units, as well as the abundance of positive reviews for the product on Spiceworks.

“In all my 17 years of IT experience, the installation of the NAS package was the easiest that I have ever encountered. Even though I consulted the instructions in the technical documentation, I was amazed at how quickly I was able to configure the product, apply the license, and start running backup jobs,” explains Bethune.

“The advantage of integrating Nakivo Backup & Replication and Synology NAS servers is that everything is contained in one device – backup software, backup storage, and backup hardware – so we are not consuming the resources of our virtualized environment. Another benefit is the licensing model that Nakivo offers. While I purchased one license, I was able to run the software on both our main Synology NAS server onsite and our offsite server, without the need to double on the licenses,” he added.

At the town of Kentville, a total of approximately 13 forever-incremental backups are scheduled every day, about an hour apart.

“When I first tested VM backup, I immediately noticed that backups were at least ten times faster compared to our previous backup product. The speeds were improved not only for the forever-incremental backup processes – the initial full backup was also faster,” reports Bethune.

With backup copy, the town of Kentville keeps backup copies offsite for an extra level of protection.

“After a backup increment finishes, I then run a backup copy job to our offsite Synology NAS server. I enjoy the email verifications that I receive right after the completion of the onsite backup jobs and the offsite backup copy jobs,” he also says.

Because Exchange and the file server are crucial to the town of Kentville’s daily operations, instant granular recovery is an imperative feature for them to have.

“Once in a blue moon, someone will delete a file or an email, something they do not want to delete, and then they contact me to help them get it back. Instant file recovery and instant object recovery are great features to have for these cases. Again, compared to the previous backup product, with Nakivo Backup & Replication, I can recover individual files, folders, and emails much faster. The product just spins the vmdk disks and parses the file structure right away,” explains Bethune.

Nakivo installed on Synology NAS provides the town of Kentville with fast VM backup and instant granular recovery. The town can backup their VMware VMs 10X faster than they could with their previous backup software. Furthermore, Nakivo also allows the town to keep backup copies offsite and near-instantly recover files, folders, and emails.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication allows us to utilize our current infrastructure and achieve fast and stable VM backups, all with ease of use and lower pricing. The product also helped me minimize stress with email notifications and automated reporting. While I am getting notifications of successful backup jobs completions, I am happy, and can move to other IT projects,” concluded Bethune.