Town of DeWitt in Onondaga County, NY, Chooses Nakivo Backup & Replication

Nakivo, Inc. announced that the Town of DeWitt has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their environment.

The Town of DeWitt is a town in Onondaga County, NY, USA. As of 2018, the town has a population of over 25,000 residents. It is named after Major Moses DeWitt, who was a judge and a soldier. The town is fortunate to have a prominent location in New York State. Industry and commerce have settled here due to the accessible transportation options of a regional airport, rail yards, the Route 90 east-west Thruway, north-south Route 81, and its proximity to Canada.

NetManageIT is a MSP in the central New York area that has been servicing customers for over 25 years. The company has many municipal customers and is experienced in managing and servicing such customers. Dan Bender, CTO, NetManageIT, is the lead engineer who has been servicing the Town of DeWitt since 2011. The town’s infrastructure consists of 2 Hyper-V hosts, 1 physical server for the police department, and 10 VMs. VMs store a variety of data and applications, including the main file server, a Linux server for archival purposes, a Exchange server, a SQL server for municipal applications, a terminal server, a monitoring server, and an application server running various apps. Governmental operations and the police department must be available 24/7, and the town must have a reliable DR solution. If systems are unavailable, the town will not be able to service the residents properly.

Previously, the Town of DeWitt relied on services of another VM backup and DR solution. Although the product’s performance was adequate for the town, the biggest disadvantage was the lack of backup support for physical servers and workstations. Developers had been working on adding this functionality for over a year, but progress was slow, and the product contained multiple bugs. Initially, the bar was set high because the previous product provided ease-of-use and good pricing. However, Backup & Replication turned out to be an excellent alternative. The solution proved to be more affordable and provided support for backup of physical servers and workstations.

The solution performs native, image-based, incremental, and application-aware backups for VMware, Hyper-V, Amazon EC2, Nutanix AHV environments, and for Windows/Linux physical servers and workstations. Moreover, the product offers SaaS backup for Office 365. It provides granular recovery of files and application objects, recovery of full VMs, and instant recovery of physical machines from backups as VMware VMs.

The product offers flexibility in installation options, as it can be installed on Windows/Linux, deployed as a pre-configured virtual appliance, or installed on NAS devices.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication is one of the easiest products in terms of installation and usability, and I have used a bunch of major players in the same industry. There was a learning curve, but nothing drastic at all. We appreciate the flexibility of the numerous hardware platforms and methods to deploy the product. Backup & Replication is lightweight and does not take numerous resources,” says Bender.

With Nakivo, the Town of DeWitt has physical backup capabilities and virtual backup capabilities in one solution.

“We stagger all our backup jobs onsite and offsite to spread the load. We backup critical servers every few hours, and all offsite backup copy jobs are done nightly during non-business hours to reduce the load on the Internet pipe. Global de-dupe has been great, as we managed to save local and offsite storage space. With that, we reduced our storage costs, and that helped us immensely,” says Bender.

The Town of DeWitt can perform Windows Server backup, ensuring consistency of all applications and databases. Moreover, the product protects data stored on desktops and laptops. Nakivo features support for physical machines that allows organizations to perform backups of Windows 10-based PCs. Backup copy functionality allows the Town of DeWitt to have an extra copy of backups at an offsite location. With the product, you can copy backups from one backup repository to another without touching the source hosts or VMs.

The solution provides the Town of DeWitt with ease-of-use, an affordable pricing model, virtual and physical backups under one roof. With Nakivo, the town can backup critical VMs as well as physical servers and workstations. With data de-dupe, the town saved storage space and reduced storage costs. With backup copy functionality, the town can create and maintain copies of backups offsite.

“With our previous product, we could not backup our physical servers and workstations. The biggest immediate benefit is that now we can backup our entire infrastructure with one solution. With Nakivo Backup & Replication, we not only keep public services running but also save a couple of thousand $s per year,” says Bender.