NAKIVO Helps Academic Association Meet RTO Requirements

Business Challenge

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is an academic society dedicated to the use of mathematics in industry. Headquartered in Philadelphia, the society was founded in 1951 to advance the application of mathematics to science and industry, promote mathematics research and provide media for the exchange of information and ideas among mathematicians, engineers and scientists. Through publications, research and community, SIAM’s mission is to build cooperation between mathematics and the worlds of science and technology.

A single site houses most of SIAM’s IT infrastructure, which consists of 10 physical servers and over 70 virtual machines that run Windows and Linux servers, supporting web, databases and applications. The virtual machines support the full stack of websites, including association management system, member portal, journal submission and a peer review system, and a variety of marketing and specific application-oriented websites. Any kind of data loss would bring SIAM’s operations to a standstill. Journal publishing would stop, subscription fulfillment would cease, and software development would also stop. All business operations would be impacted until the affected systems are restored. That is why a reliable data protection solution that can back up and recover all data and systems swiftly should be in place in order for the business to keep running.

SIAM had relied on another data protection solution for backing up VMs in the past. The major disadvantage of SIAM’s previous backup software was the amount of effort required to recover from a complete disaster. Essentially, the IT team would have to spend an entire day just to get the product’s environment up and running before even starting to recover the company’s data and servers. Due to this, SIAM decided to look for alternative solutions that would fit its budget and ensure availability of its infrastructure with near-instant recovery. “We wanted flexibility, native support for offsite rotation of removable disk drives, and a demonstrated track record of new added features as technology evolves,” says Ted Kull, Director of Information Systems at SIAM.

Solution

“The decision to select NAKIVO Backup & Replication pretty much was done after the software ticked all our boxes, including fast recovery times, flexibility of installation and configuration, overall architecture of the product and its price. Overall, the total cost of ownership proved to be worth it for us in the long run,” says Ted.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides a complete solution that includes backup, backup size reduction, replication, backup copy, backup to tape, granular recovery, site recovery for both virtualized and physical environments, all in one convenient web interface. NAKIVO Backup & Replication also provides flexible pricing that includes per-socket perpetual or per-workload subscription. With versatile deployment options, including installation on Windows, Linux, as a VMware/Nutanix AHV VA, as an Amazon Machine Image, or on NAS devices, NAKIVO Backup & Replication is flexible and convenient.

“The installation and configuration process was intuitive, while the web interface and operational concepts just make sense. Support is also excellent, as we contacted support several times during the testing and prototyping stages, and every time the response was great. We saved a tremendous amount of time on installation, as everything was very straightforward, from configuring transporters, to running the first backup jobs,” says Ted. NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers technical support right from the product’s web interface, where you can connect with a representative via a chat option.

“Our infrastructure is continuously backed up and recovery points are taken one to two times per day, depending on the nature of the source system. Our backup copy jobs to portable USB drives start every Friday. With backup copy, Site Recovery, granular recovery, backup size reduction functionalities such as compression and global data deduplication, we have a more complete and flexible solution at a similar cost to that of the previous solution. While our expenses are almost the same, choosing NAKIVO Backup & Replication translates to greater value and cost reduction for the future,” says Ted.

The primary functionality that SIAM was mostly interested in is the ability to perform a full restore from scratch, using any backup media (such as a portable USB drive) within a few minutes. After testing, NAKIVO Backup & Replication proved to meet our recovery-time-objective (RTO). “NAKIVO Backup & Replication met our RTO expectations in terms of the recovery speed and we are quite certain that we would be able to recover our data and servers much faster than in the past, if an actual disaster were to strike. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we can create automated Site Recovery jobs for a wide variety of scenarios, so that we avoid downtime and ensure business continuity,” says Ted.

Results

With the range of features in NAKIVO Backup & Replication, SIAM minimizes downtime and ensures continuity of business services. SIAM backs up data and servers every day with VM backup and does back copy jobs once a week. SIAM also is finally able to recover data from scratch just within a few minutes. NAKIVO Backup & Replication meets the company’s RTO requirements, as recovery speed is much faster than that of the previous backup product.

“From a daily operation perspective, we are happy, as NAKIVO Backup & Replication does not take an enormous amount of time to operate and almost everything is automated anyways. What was proven via testing is that our potential savings are way higher with NAKIVO Backup & Replication. We estimate that we will be able to recover from a complete disaster in about 50% to 75% of the time it would have taken us with our previous product,” says Ted.

About Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is an international society of over 14,000 individual members, including applied and computational mathematicians and computer scientists, as well as other scientists and engineers. Members from 85 countries include researchers, educators, students and practitioners in industry, government, laboratories and academia. The Society, which also includes nearly 500 academic and corporate institutional members, serves and advances the disciplines of applied mathematics and computational science by publishing a variety of books and prestigious peer-reviewed research journals, by conducting conferences and by hosting activity groups in various areas of mathematics. For more information, please visit www.siam.org.