Polish MSP HosTeam Chooses Nakivo Backup & Replication

Nakivo Inc. announced that HosTeam has selected its Backup & Replication to protect its environment.

HosTeam started in 2009 as a hosting provider with 3 co-located servers. Currently, the company has hundreds of servers with a network capacity of over 400Gb/s. Its main services are virtualization and private cloud solutions. It offers Hyper-V and vSphere virtualization, as well as DDoS mitigation services.

It has 2 sites. The primary one in Warsaw has 300 physical servers and 1,000 VMs and the secondary one stores all the backup copies of critical information. VMs store customer data that is mostly web services. There are several different environments, ranging from a small single server to as large as a few dozen servers. HosTeam provides virtualization services with storage and firewalls to their customers. Data integrity is critical for the company, as several customers from the banking industry have to report data loss to the government.

In the past, the end user relied on open-source tools and backup tools from their storage providers for data protection. The main issue was that backups required too much storage space and bandwidth. The previous tool only did a full backup and did not provide incremental backup. There were also random failed backup jobs, inconsistent backups, and failed recoveries. the firm needed a reliable VM backup solution that would provide incremental backups and consistent reporting.

Backup & Replication offers data protection for virtual, physical, cloud, and SaaS environments. The solution provides a range of functionalities, including installation on a NAS server, backup to tape, backup to cloud, granular recovery, DR orchestration, failover/failback, reporting. It also offers some of a competitive pricing.

“Backup & Replication offered us a variety of features at an affordable price. We tested other similar solutions and all were way too expensive for us,” says Bartosz Waszak, co-owner, HosTeam.

With the solution’s robust backup, HosTeam can create image-based, incremental, and app-aware backups of VMs. With VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology, only changes are copied to the backup repository, resulting in faster backups.

“Most of our VMs are backed up on a daily basis, and few of our VMs are backed up twice a day. We have agreements with our customers that backups should be scheduled at fixed hours. Usually, all our backup jobs finish successfully within four to five hours. Incremental backups are much appreciated since now backups finish much faster. We enjoy direct access to storage, as well, so we can backup without overloading our ESXi servers,” says Bartosz.

“Instant VM recovery and instant granular recovery functionalities save a lot of time for HosTeam. Situations occur when customers need to recover only a single file, and we can do that in just a couple of minutes with instant file recovery. Sometimes, we have to boot a previous version of the database server to check some records in the database. Instant recovery is a big advantage, as previously we had to extract complete VM images, then boot, and copy files from the OS,” he adds. “With Backup & Replication, we have much more reliable backups. And with screenshot verification, we can test those backups anytime, to make sure that they are good and recoverable. With reporting, we receive cyclical reports to our email about the progress of our backups. Previously, we had to manually check that backups were done correctly, but with  Backup & Replication, everything is now automated. Our senior administrators saved their time because the user-friendly web interface means they can offload recovering data for customers to helpdesk or junior administrators.“