Taiwanese College Oriental Institute of Technology Customer of Nakivo

Nakivo Inc. announced that Oriental Institute of Technology has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their virtual environment.

The institute was founded more than 50 years ago, and has maintained its teaching concepts emphasis on practices and professional knowledge, making it a recognized establishment by businesses in Taiwan. In recent years, it spent tens of millions of dollars to build up a functional fashion fabric product line base, allowing students to gain knowledge in the fields of knitting product lines, fabric digital printing lines, and functional fabric accessories prior to their graduation.

This has made the institute an occupational skill school for numerous high school students looking to learn a trade. In order to provide diversified learning for students, it has 3 major academic groups of electronic communications – engineering, management, and health.

Through collaboration from respective departments, and in response to industry needs, related courses are established to offer students cross-field learning and enhance their professional knowledge and occupational competitiveness.

In addition to the enhancement of teaching quality, Oriental Institute of Technology spares no efforts in investing in basic information system improvement.

A VMware host virtualization solution was introduced in as early as 2009, in order to ensure a more stable administration information system. However, the institute did not have an appropriate VM backup solution, and backup could only be conducted manually. In 2014, storage equipment was purchased and the institute obtained a free backup tool that came with the equipment. This allowed the school to improve their data protection techniques. However, there were still lots of shortages for this software and, therefore, the library information center decided, in 2016, to look for a professional VM backup solution.

Jie Yang, system engineer of network technology team, from the library information center of Oriental Institute of Technology, explained that there were 3 major issues with their previous backup tool: the need for close collaboration with VMWare Tools, that backup data verification could only be done manually, and the slow recovery time. All these disadvantages had made their daily operations troublesome.

Take MS SQL database with the size of roughly 2TB, as an example. Time needed for recovery was as long as 24 hours. With this, the school was forced to conduct only one disaster backup drill every semester. Such a lengthy recovery time did not correlate with the school’s goal of recovering application services within 24 hours.

Meanwhile, team leader Ji-Shan Lin, from the administration system team, explained that the school had started to look for suitable VM backup solution available on the market, based on three metrics: the cost of the product, the product’s functionality, and support service.

Through Xander International Corp.‘s introduction, the school started to perform testing and evaluation on the Backup & Replication solution. During the POC process, backup time for the original MS SQL database had been reduced to 6 to 8 hours, and it took 30 minutes to complete verification of backup data accuracy. Data verification speed increased by more than 48X. That was why the school had finally decided to purchase Backup & Replication at the end of 2017.

Nakivo provides fast, reliable, and cost-efficient data protection solutions for VMWare, Hyper-V, AWS, physical, and cloud environments. Its solution can improve backup efficiency, enhance backup reliability, and increase recovery speed, as well as ensure time savings in terms of costs and backup management for the customers. It provides an easy-to-use web interface in addition to offering integration with various NAS devices, including Synology, WD, Qnap, Asustor, Netgear. This integration eliminates the need to purchase additional specific storage equipment.

With the help of the Nakivo solution, Oriental Institute of Technology is able to automatically backup data from more than 100 VMs to 3 sets of storage equipment in 12 hours, during the off-peak period. Such improvement in backup speed has enhanced the level of data protection for the whole institute. Specifically, the scheduling functionality allows the institute to schedule backup jobs on particular days and at specific times. Therefore, with the help of this scheduling functionality, operations of other critical applications are not affected.

“Previously, we needed to do additional cloning on our VMs, in order to solve the problem of slow recovery time that other backup solutions offered us. This increased our workload dramatically and the time needed to do the whole process was extremely long,” Yang explained. “Now, once we switched to Backup & Replication, all the work is completed automatically. VM recovery and instant file recovery offer us a super-fast way to recover full VMs and individual files. Moreover, Backup & Replication provides us with real-time and speedy customer support. Responses for most issues can be received within 24 hours. This really helps us a lot.“

Finally, Lin indicated that, after the introduction of Nakivo solution, their recovery time is reduced and the workload for the network technology team decreased substantially. Additionally, DR tests that originally could only be conducted once every half year can be done every week. There is also the possibility of moving towards once every day in the future. With this improvement, the team can meet its ISMS requirements, while providing better information services to their students and faculty. As a result, the school’s information service quality has improved.

It has been more one and a half years since institute’s introduction of Nakivo Backup Solution. Backup and recovery speed, software operation interface and technology service quality have all met the expectations of the project. According to the library information center’s plan, in addition to the continued enhancement of information backup process in the future, there will also be further plans to build up an offsite backup mechanism to ensure a better backup system for information systems.

Nakivo provides Oriental Institute of Technology with faster VM backup and recovery speed, automatic data verification process, scheduling functionality, and significant improvements in the overall workload for the team. VM recovery time was previously at least 24 hours, while it can be just a couple of hours. Backup data verification could only be done manually, and would have lasted at least two days, while the process can take as little as 30 minutes. So, this is a 48X improvement. Finally, DR tests can be performed every week, not once every half year.

“With Backup & Replication, Oriental Institute of Technology is now able to complete a full backup for 100 VMs in 12 hours and recover backup data within just a few hours. This ensured successful operations for the institute’s IT system. With the establishment of Backup & Replication, the institute enjoyed dramatic backup and recovery time improvement, while allowing for flexible utilization of manpower in the Library Information Center. This has further complied with our ISMS requirements and the enhancement of overall performance is extremely satisfactory.“