A Marine Navigation Firm Significantly Reduces VM Backup Time with NAKIVO

Business Challenge

Founded in 1998, ChartCo, the global fore-runner in digital navigation services and voyage compliance, provides market-leading products and services to the most demanding of fleets. Today, the company helps more than 13,500 vessel owners and crews to reduce their cost of operations, improve situational awareness, and manage the ever-increasing levels of regulatory compliance. ChartCo holds the 2018 SMART4SEA eNavigation Award in recognition of their accomplishments in facilitating the transition of digital navigation in commercial shipping.

With a total of nine offices around the world, ChartCo’s main office is located in London, UK. For ChartCo, having a consistent and reliable VM backup system is critical, as backup and recovery is key for the success of their day-to-day operations. Especially in situations such as if a VM being corrupted, a file being lost or even a more serious crash; a VM backup solution can solve these kinds of issues.

In the past, ChartCo used a different VM backup solution to protect their VM environment, however, the product had several disadvantages. With the past product, the whole VM backup process took a very long time. At the same time, the backup jobs would constantly fail and continuously had to be restarted. VM recovery was also painfully very slow, such time frames were not acceptable, as the business could not tolerate a long wait if a critical VM were to fail and needs to be recovered quickly. For this reason, ChartCo decided to investigate other available products on the market, and ultimately made the choice to implement NAKIVO Backup & Replication in the end.

Solution

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is aimed at protecting cloud and virtual environments, as well as offering storage integration with EMC Data Domain Boost. NAKIVO Backup & Replication supports the BoostFS plugin fully and properly, in addition to being certified by Dell/EMC Data Domain. Support for EMC Data Domain Boost provides several advantages, including increased backup performance, optimized bandwidth usage, and storage space savings.

“Since we already had an EMC Data Domain in place, we were specifically looking for a VM backup solution that would be compatible with EMC DDB. Our previous solution did not offer us such integration. However, NAKIVO Backup & Replication and our EMC DDB are working well with each other; plus, the combination of software and hardware provides us with great benefits, including faster backup speeds and compression,” says Asim Syed, Group Head of IT at ChartCo.

Since ChartCo switched to NAKIVO Backup & Replication, VM backups time have significantly reduced by 90%. In addition, the integration also helped the company to save their storage space by 50%. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a light solution that helps us back up our entire infrastructure with deduplication and compression, we reduced the need to expand our storage along with saving money,” explains Asim.

With instant VM recovery, NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides a near-instant way to recover full VMs. “The whole VM recovery process is not only much simpler but also way faster. The restores literally take minutes rather than hours, which is significant time savings for us,” says Asim.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication also offers visibility into their virtual environment for ChartCo, with the help of email notifications and reports. “We take advantage of both the email notifications and the pdf reports. It is quite useful for us to be able to look at the report every morning and have full visibility of what is going on with our backups, and whether everything had finished successfully that night. Once we see an email notification or a warning message, we can reach support immediately by attaching a support bundle,” says Asim.

Results

NAKIVO Backup & Replication and the product’s integration with EMC DDB provides ChartCo with better VM backup performance, storage space savings, and fast VM recovery. Furthermore, with deduplication and compression, the company was able to decrease its storage space consumption by 50%. The previous backup solution required extra work hours to be spent on monitoring the product, since the backup jobs often failed for no apparent reason; but by switching to NAKIVO Backup & Replication, CharCo’s IT team is no longer wasting time on trying to figure out what went wrong, because the VM backups are reliable and efficient. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication’s integration with EMC DDB has been a great experience for us so far, considering that we have gained so many advantages in comparison to what we experienced with the previous solution. We have gained much better VM backup performance and phenomenal VM recovery performance.” says Asim.

About ChartCo

ChartCo is an award-winning global fore-runner in digital navigation and compliance solutions. ChartCo helps mariners navigate safely, believing they should move vessels, not paper. With more than 13,500 vessels using their market-leading products and services each year, ChartCo offers a single solution for key compliance and e-navigation challenges - ChartCo OneOcean. This powerful platform is created with the capability to integrate existing compliance monitoring and management tools, giving mariners and shoreside teams the information they need, when they need it. With a suite of comprehensive applications, the platform is designed to make life easier onboard and onshore. For more information, please visit www.chartco.com.