FL-Based Stages of Life Medical Institute Chooses Nakivo Backup & Replication

FL-based Stages of Life Medical Institute has selected Nakivo Backup & Replication to protect their environment.

It is a group medical practice focusing on the diagnosis and treatment of pain and pain-related problems. Employing a holistic approach, the practice treats a variety of pain problems, from headache to foot pain, neuritis to colitis, and other problems.

The practice draws many patients from across the US and frequently receives patients from overseas. In addition to treating headaches, abdominal and back pain, degenerative diseases and trauma, the practice performs many of their own diagnostic modalities.

Stages of Life Medical Institute has one site, 17 VMs, and a dedicated NAS server for storing backups. VMs store several applications for electronic health records, laboratory management, inventory management, customer portals and reporting services.

The practice also relies on applications like Microsoft Active Directory, file servers, electronic health records and laboratory systems. All these applications store critical patient data. Thus the practice needs to create image-based backups several times a day. Therefore, it has always relied heavily on a backup solution to ensure operations continuity at any given time and maintain availability of patient data.

Before virtualizing its environment, the institute had only physical servers and did a standard Windows Server backup. Plus, the institute was storing critical files in the cloud. Moreover, there was no tool in place to manage the complete recovery of critical systems. In case of a disaster, the recovery had to be done manually, and it was a long process. Upon complete modernization of its infrastructure, the practice decided that a solution that would support image-based backups, VM replication and instant VM recovery was the only reasonable path going forward.

Backup & Replication was recommended to Martin Jirkal, senior IT infrastructure manager, Stage of Life Medical Institute, by his peers in the industry.

Nakivo was a fit for the practice’s needs given the solution’s unbeatable cost-to-functionality ratio. Moreover, it has customer reviews across various IT platforms, with a 98% satisfaction rate. The vendor protects data via image-based and incremental backups, allow customers to automate replication jobs, as well as decrease recovery time for full VMs, individual files and application objects. In addition, the software integrates with Microsoft Active Directory for simple user management.

“We deployed Backup & Replication as a pre-configured virtual appliance, and our backups are stored on an independent FreeNAS server. As an industry professional, I had no issues with installation and configuration. The web interface is simple, yet easy to navigate. With the v10 makeover, the interface became even better,” says Martin.

Nakivo allows the practice to perform consistent, image-based backups of VMs, ensuring that all the data gets captured during backup.

“We backup our critical systems several times a day, while most of the infrastructure on a nightly basis, and less critical systems on a weekly basis. Backups scheduled for nighttime usually finish successfully within an hour. The best part of VM backup is the global data de-dupe functionality that allows us to have a detailed data retention scheme. Currently, we are using 20 TB of storage and have up to a year of history. The overall data retention configuration is great and super easy to manage,” says Martin.

Nakivo provides its customer with a way to replicate VMs to a remote location, so that in case of a disaster, VM replicas can be powered on at a secondary location.

“VM replication is the most critical feature for us. We are replicating VMs on every night, and we have successfully performed several DR tests, which always worked like a charm. VM replication jobs also take around an hour to complete,” says Martin.

With the previous approach to data protection, the recovery had to be done manually. Nakivo provides a near-instant way to recover entire VMs, individual files, and application objects.

“The biggest advantage for us is that we can not only rely on our backups, but also that we can recover from our backups as well. If data loss occurs, we can quickly restore from any given time point in the previous months. The peace of mind to the owners is priceless,” says Martin.

Nakivo protects the virtual environment of Stages of Life Medical Institute with the help of image-based VM backup, global data de-dupe, VM replication, instant VM boot and instant granular recovery. The practice can schedule backups on a daily, nightly and weekly basis and saves significant storage space with global data de-dupe. VM replication allows it to recover from a disaster with a few clicks, while instant VM recovery helps with recovery of VMs, files, and application objects.

“The overall performance of Backup & Replication is amazing. We never had to pay extra for additional functionality that came in the new product versions and that truly counts. The difference between automated image-based VM backups and Windows Server backups is of course indescribable. We never experienced any problems with the solution and Nakivo’s support is always there to help us,” says Martin.