A Leading German Corporate Publisher Selects NAKIVO Backup & Replication to Protect their VMware Environment
Business Challenge
A few years ago - when corps. was a much smaller company - availability of IT systems and data protection was a minor factor for corps. "We could afford to wait for a few hours or even for a day for something to be restored," says Simon Flohr, Project Manager and Head of IT at corps. "This has changed recently as we continue to grow the company. In the past, we mainly published quarterly magazines. But now we have many monthly and even weekly publications, so with this short time to make an issue we just cannot afford to have any significant downtime."
Providing business availability and data protection became one of the top business priorities. As a first step in the process of improved availability and data protection, the company moved its IT infrastructure from physical servers to VMware vSphere.
"We now have a standard set of applications such as Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory, file and print servers, and so on that run on VMware," says Simon. "Additionally we also have some specialized applications on VMware for our publishing needs, like VMs for our management system, which we use to issue our publications. Finally, our most important VMs are our customer databases where we store our customers’ data with addresses and so on."
After the migration was complete, corps. began looking for a native VMware backup solution. Their new IT services and support partner - Hanno Kirchhoff EDV-Beratung GmbH - recommended NAKIVO Backup & Replication, and corps. began evaluating the solution.
Solution
"Since the time NAKIVO Backup & Replication was installed and configured by our IT services partner, it has been transparent, extremely available, and I can easily use it even though I'm not a professional VMware administrator," says Simon.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication is VMware-certified, purely agentless, and features a simple and intuitive Web interface. The product provides image-based backup and replication of entire VMs, supports live applications and databases, and enables instant recovery of VMs, files, and application objects directly from compressed and deduplicated VM backups. The product also speeds up data transfer with network acceleration and reduces data size with global deduplication and compression.
Simon appreciates the email reporting feature of NAKIVO Backup & Replication. "The product is running backup jobs every day, so I really want to know what was done and if all the jobs finished successfully," says Simon. "That's what I really like about NAKIVO Backup & Replication – it sends me daily reports over email with all the information that I need, so I can monitor the state of VM backup."
Results
NAKIVO Backup & Replication is used to protect VMware infrastructure at corps. "NAKIVO Backup & Replication has worked perfectly for us thus far and we plan to use it for the years to come," says Simon. "I'm now confident that if our systems fail, NAKIVO Backup & Replication will restore them quickly and effortlessly, saving us a lot of money and time. This gives me a piece of mind."
Company Profile
Corporate Publishing Services GmbH (corps.) is one of the largest publishing groups for business media in Germany. Founded in 1999, the company started with less than 10 people and has since become a major producer of corporate media.
Corps. provides a complete set of publishing services: from creating a media concept, texts, and art to project planning, management, media production, advertising, sales, subscription services, and marketing. For over 15 years, the company has produced over 1,000 business magazine issues on behalf of their clients.
Corps. is proud not only of its long-term cooperation with many of their customers, but also of its numerous awards, including the Best of Corporate Publishing Awards (6 gold, 17 Silver, and 1 Bronze), Fox Awards (2 Gold), Horizon Award (Gold), International Automotive Advertising Award, Mercury Grand Award, and Cannes Lions Media Award (Silver). For more information, visit www.corps-verlag.de.