College Saint François in France Chooses Nakivo Backup & Replication

Nakivo Inc. announced that College Saint François has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their environment.

College Saint François is a middle school in Les Hauts-d’Anjou, France, for students from grades 3 to 6. Alexandre Belouin, who joined the college in 2007, is the school’s IT manager.

The college consists of a single site with 3 physical servers and 9 VMs. Each classroom is equipped with a computer, a video projector, and a sound installation, while 3 multimedia rooms have 25, 30, and 35 workstations each. The VMs store different data, including intranet, special software for storing documentation, file servers, accounting, and student databases.

For the school, backup and replication are vital for restoring data and services quickly without much downtime. Backing up data is important to avoid wasting all the effort that went into maintaining records and documentation. In case of data loss, administrative personnel would not be able to perform their duties, and teachers would lose their access to the computers, which would prevent them from conducting lessons.

Previously, the school relied on manual backups of VMs and file synchronization. Backing up manually was a tedious process, while recovering a VM took hours. Once the college invested in 2 servers and a vCenter solution, they considered investing in a VM backup solution designed for VMware environments.

After testing a couple of VM backup solutions available on the market, College Saint François chose Backup & Replication for the solution’s simplicity and ease of management. The solution offers data protection functionalities like VM backup, VM replication, VM recovery for virtualized environments, such as vSphere, Hyper-V, Amazon EC2, and Nutanix AHV.

The solution offers several installation options for convenience and an affordable pricing structure. It supports other functionalities, including backup to cloud, backup to tape, and Office 365 backup.

“By following the steps outlined by Nakivo in regards to installation and configuration, I was able to install the product quite easily. The web interface is uncluttered, and the home page nicely summarizes the product’s overall activity,” says Belouin “Currently, Backup & Replication is installed on a VM. The next step will be moving Backup & Replication to a NAS server. Once I deploy NAS servers in various buildings for DR purposes, we will strongly consider this type of deployment.“

VM backup is critical for College Saint François, as the functionality allows to go back in time and recover data in part or in full. Nakivo creates image-based, incremental, and application-aware backups. Moreover, all VM backups can be automatically compressed and de-duped, which optimizes storage space.

“We perform VM backup once a day from Monday evening till Friday evening. Backing up files takes approximately 30 minutes. Since I no longer have to do everything manually. Things have become much easier for me. The product does its job well, and then I receive reports via email regarding my backups,” says Belouin.

VM replication creates an exact copy of the source VM and puts this copy on a target VMware ESXi host. VM replicas are in a powered off state, and if a disaster strikes, you can power on the VM replicas and continue operating from an offsite environment. VM replication protects from downtime and data loss caused by a disaster occurring at a particular location.

“Thanks to VM replication, I can power on a VM replica anytime, even the VM replica that was created the day before. When I’m creating a VM replication job, the advanced interface is well thought out,” says Belouin. “Being able to choose each parameter or setting simply and precisely is a joy. For critical services, VM replication jobs take approximately two hours per evening.“

Nakivo provides College Saint François with simplicity, easy management, and reliable VM backup/replication.

“Since I was doing backups manually in the past, having a VM backup solution that was specifically designed for VMware environments is a complete 180. The first advantage is the simplicity that I achieved with Nakivo Backup & Replication’s web interface. Secondly, I choose the desired frequency with which I create different backup and replication jobs in Backup & Replication. Lastly, with VM replication, we can overcome site failure in case of a disaster. Backup & Replication saved my personal time, as I no longer need to manage the manual backups. I saved money for the school, and I work on other tasks that relate to our IT environment,” says Belouin.