NAKIVO Cuts VM Backup Time by 2.5X and Improves Visibility for a Health Center

Business Challenge

Southern Surgery and Urology is based in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The center’s ten physicians provide general surgery, as well as urology services to their patients. In 2017, Southern Surgery and Urology decided to virtualize their IT environment on VMware vSphere ESXi. The center is still slowly transitioning to complete virtualization of their entire IT infrastructure. As of now, key VMware VMs run the center’s two primary medical software servers and a vCenter server. During the virtualization phase, Southern Surgery and Urology had two goals that they aimed to achieve. The center wanted to back up their critical VMware VMs onsite, while also copying VM backups offsite.

Southern Surgery and Urology’s medical software is the center’s most critical system. It needs to be available because patient care would be severely impacted without proper access to patient information. In addition, the weather can be unpredictable in the southern parts of the USA; tornadoes are a particular concern in these areas. Southern Surgery and Urology only has one site, consequently, weather can directly impact data availability, networks, and the success of the center’s day-to-day operations. In the past, the center did not have a stable VM backup solution nor an offsite disaster recovery strategy. Southern Surgery and Urology has since purchased a cloud-based backup software, designed to back up files and folders.

“We were backing up file-level changes with a cloud-based backup software to a local NAS. Also, we were doing backups to Amazon S3. Backup speed was slow, as backups of two primary medical software servers were taking from two to three hours every night. Moreover, there was no way to verify that a backup had been completed successfully, while notifications and reporting could have been better. As we moved our environment to VMware vSphere ESXi, we definitely needed a reliable VM backup solution. NAKIVO Backup & Replication was a perfect long-term solution for us, in order to create a new disaster recovery strategy, by backing up VMware VMs onsite and sending backup copies offsite,” explains David Judice, Information Technology Manager at Southern Surgery and Urology.

Solution

Southern Surgery and Urology replaced their cloud-based backup software with NAKIVO Backup & Replication to manage their virtual environment. The switch to NAKIVO Backup & Replication was implemented by David and an external IT consultant, who had previous experience with the product. After the testing period, Southern Surgery and Urology chose NAKIVO Backup & Replication to protect their critical VMware VMs. Now, with NAKIVO Backup & Replication, VMware VMs are backed up onsite, while backup copies are created and sent offsite. “As the IT consultant had experience with NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the whole installation and configuration process went smoothly. He walked me through all the necessary steps, thus I could understand what was going on. After we upgraded to a newer version of the product, I myself was already quite proficient with NAKIVO Backup & Replication,” says David.

VM backup performance is one of NAKIVO Backup & Replication’s benefits, as daily VM backup duration decreased from two or three hours to under an hour for Southern Surgery and Urology. “I back up two large medical databases that store approximately 1.5TB of data every day. I back up VMs to a local NAS and the backups finish in around an hour, most time even less than that. The backup for a vCenter server, which is only 120GB, takes even less, under 10 minutes usually. With the previous cloud-based backup software, backups finished within two to three hours. While with NAKIVO Backup & Replication, backups finish sometimes in even 40 minutes,” says David.

In addition to VM backup performance improvement, Southern Surgery and Urology also achieved storage space savings. “With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we are using our storage space more efficiently and saving money on our external storage. Now, we can back up more data and store that data for longer period of time”, says David. After backing up VMs onsite, David creates and copies backups offsite, in order to protect the primary infrastructure from any local disasters. VM backups are essentially copied to an external NAS. In an event of a major hardware or software failure or a natural disaster, Southern Surgery and Urology can recover their critical backups from the offsite location.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides Southern Surgery and Urology with email notifications (that include screenshot verification of successful backup completion), reporting, and monitoring capabilities. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides clear dashboards that inform us about backup job status and bandwidth usage. Furthermore, reporting is phenomenal and extremely informative. Reports make my job much easier,” David states.

Results

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides Southern Surgery and Urology with a new disaster recovery strategy that consists of backing up VMs onsite and copying backups offsite. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the center improved VM backup performance, saved storage space, gained better visibility of backup with reporting capabilities, and gained assurance that their backups are done correctly. Using NAKIVO Backup & Replication, Southern Surgery and Urology cut backup time by 2.5X. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a great product at a phenomenal price. With reports and email notifications, I can better monitor the virtual environment of the Southern Surgery and Urology. By identifying and resolving issues quickly, I spend less time on the whole backup administration process. Overall, we are happy that NAKIVO Backup & Replication allowed us to improve our disaster recovery strategy,” says David.

About Southern Surgery and Urology Center

Southern Surgery and Urology Center provides a variety of general surgery treatment options and urology services for patients in Hattiesburg, MS, United States. Their physicians have over 40 years of experience in the industry and are committed to providing patients with the best care possible. Their certified physicians treat a full range of general surgery problems for their patients. Physicians also provide expert urology diagnosis, treatment, as well as testing at their facility for both men and women. Southern Surgery and Urology Center specializes in infertility, bladder leakage, erectile difficulty, kidney stones, and many other treatment services. For more information, please visit www.surgeryandurology.com.