Kaltura Achieves 12X Faster VM Backup with NAKIVO's VMware Backup Solution
Business Challenge
Headquartered in New York, USA, Kaltura is a software company that develops an open-source video platform that enhances websites with customized video, photo, and audio features. The company enables organizations to easily deploy applications that involve video creation, ingestion, publishing, management, syndication, engagement, monetization, and analysis.
"Our environment is complex because we have five different sites and some of them are offices, while others are data centers. Depending on the data center, we can have more than 400 physical servers and more than 1,000 VMs per site. The applications that we have are Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, SQL, and others," says Elad Avrahami, VP of Security and Corporate IT at Kaltura.
Kaltura's customers are major organizations located around the world, including enterprise organizations, media companies, web publishers, service providers, and educational institutions. "We need a constant, fast, and reliable VM backup and VM recovery because we have a vast amount of customer, internal, and specific historical data," says Elad. "With our previous backup solution, failed jobs were a daily matter. Sometimes, VM backups took a long time to complete. I used to run VM backups only during the weekend because two days were needed to complete all jobs. Overall, the solution was unstable, required constant monitoring, and upgrades were terrible to perform," says Elad.
Solution
"NAKIVO Backup & Replication was introduced to us by CloudWay, our software vendor," says Elad. Originally, the product was selected for two offices on two data centers. "The first installation of the product took around two hours for the entire operations to get up and running, the central management was great. NAKIVO Backup & Replication is quite intuitive and painless to configure." After a couple of days after the installation, Kaltura decided to upgrade to the new 6.0 version of the product. "The upgrade to the new version went smoothly, in 15 minutes we completed the process for the entire infrastructure," says Elad.
Among the variety of deployment options, Kaltura selected a pre-configured Virtual Appliance with NAKIVO Backup & Replication for their VM backup. "With NAKIVO Backup & Replication VA, I need no agents, the operating system consumes little resources, and I do not need to build a VM from the ground up," says Elad.
The network acceleration feature has brought a substantial business value to Kaltura. "Network acceleration is beneficial for us because of a heavy content. Network traffic is considerably reduced with NAKIVO Backup & Replication," says Elad. Data compression and traffic reduction techniques enable the product to reduce network traffic by 50% on average, thus decreasing the network load and speeding up backup times.
Recently, NAKIVO Backup & Replication has introduced version 6.1 that features job chaining and Instant Object Recovery for Microsoft Exchange 2013 and 2016. "I am especially interested in Instant Object Recovery. Before, we needed to restore the entire virtual machines, while now, we can restore individual objects, which is great," says Elad. "Moreover, I believe that job chaining, which enables running a job after a previous one has completed, will bring even more value to the success of our business," says Elad.
Results
With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, Kaltura did not experience any stability issues. In fact, Kaltura plans to expand NAKIVO Backup & Replication for additional sites. "With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we are definitely saving money because we are paying only per CPU and getting the entire set of features. Secondly, we are getting regular alerts about successful backup completion. Moreover, the product has improved our team productivity. We now have time to focus on other things because NAKIVO Backup & Replication is reliable. We never contacted support, not for implementation, configuration, or task management," says Elad.
With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, Kaltura was able to increase the VM backup performance. "The major improvement is the backup speed. I used to run VM backups only during weekends because two days were needed for backups to complete. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, VM backups take about 3-4 hours, not days. Approximately, it is a 12X improvement in VM backup speed," says Elad. "Now, I have fast VM backups that do not overload my network – so NAKIVO Backup & Replication is the best choice for Kaltura," says Elad.
Company Profile
Founded in 2006, Kaltura's mission is to power any video experience. A recognized leader in the OTT TV (Over the Top TV), OVP (Online Video Platform), EdVP (Education Video Platform) and EVP (Enterprise Video Platform) markets, Kaltura has emerged as the fastest growing video platform, and as the one with the widest use-case and appeal. Kaltura is deployed globally in thousands of enterprises, media companies, service providers and educational institutions and engages hundreds of millions of viewers at home, in work, and at school. The company is committed to its core values of openness, flexibility, and collaboration, and is the initiator and backer of the world's leading open-source video-management project, which is home to more than 100,000 community members. Kaltura's management and advisory team include a long list of seasoned entrepreneurs and industry experts with many years of experience under their belts in the areas of Internet, online video, open source systems, security, communications, marketing, entertainment industry, film-making, and more. For more information visit kaltura.org.