NAKIVO Helps ICT Provider Recover from a Disaster with VM Replication
Business Challenge
BTC Networks is a trusted partner for end-to-end, integrated engineering, quality services, and digital transformation management. More than four decades of experience have transformed BTC into a mature ICT provider and enabled the company to understand business, technology, and operational elements in great detail. BTC has grown not only in size, geography, and revenue but has also evolved a corporate culture dedicated to client satisfaction, lasting relationships, and social responsibility.
BTC’s IT infrastructure consists of 14 physical servers and 100 virtual machines across seven locations in four countries. VMs hold critical customer data, in addition to user, management, and services applications. The company’s successful daily operations rely heavily on these applications, containing essential data that must be preserved and kept available 24/7. Customer service, especially customer satisfaction, could heavily suffer if critical data gets lost. A reliable VM backup solution is key to ensuring BTC’s operations and client care.
BTC Networks examined trial versions of backup solutions from different vendors but were never completely satisfied. Most of the trials only allowed full backups and not incremental backups. Other solutions had fancy interfaces, but finding the necessary settings proved complicated. Most of them also did not have VM replication and the ability to recover individual files and objects. The goal was to find a solution that was simple to implement and maintain while offering all the features necessary for an enterprise.
Solution
In the end, NAKIVO Backup & Replication was chosen as BTC’s data protection solution for backup, replication, and recovery. BTC selected the product due to the extensive feature set, usability, and price point it has to offer. “Basically, NAKIVO Backup & Replication offered many more features than other vendors. Ease of use and implementation was the main reason why we decided to select this product. NAKIVO Backup & Replication has a user-friendly web interface, which is great for simplicity. Competitive and reasonable pricing was also a big bonus for us,” says Rogelio Alvarez, Network Analyst at BTC Networks.
“Installing and managing the software was straightforward and without any additional unnecessary settings. The simplicity of the web interface makes the software responsive and reliable, especially since recovery from a disaster should be immediate. We installed NAKIVO Backup & Replication using VMware OVA. We are also using NFS for external backup storage. Moreover, we configured replication jobs to multiple sites for disaster recovery,” says Rogelio.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides incremental, image-based, and application-aware VMware backups. “We perform VM backup every 1 hour, 8 hours, and 24 hours. Policy-based search criteria have greatly helped us, as we can now manage which VM goes to which backup job by using VMware tags, states, folders, and more. This simplifies and speeds up how we manage the backup jobs classifications of over 100 VMs,” says Rogelio.
BTC Networks also utilizes VM replication, instant VM recovery, and instant file recovery. “VM replication helped us recover quickly from a disaster situation we had a while back. VM replicas are stored on our disaster recovery sites, we just have to power them on when something occurs on our main site. Replication duration is also fast because of the incremental replication approach,” says Rogelio.
“Instant VM recovery proved effective when our critical VMs were corrupted for different reasons. We were able to recover these VMs within an acceptable time frame. There were also cases where users mistakenly deleted their files or emails. With instant granular recovery, we managed to recover all critical files and emails quickly,” says Rogelio.
Results
“NAKIVO Backup & Replication has an easy-to-use interface and is rather simple to install and manage; we just deployed the software once and never had to configure anything again. Moreover, NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a reliable VM backup solution with reasonable pricing. The product solved all the issues we encountered with different vendors and repeatedly proved itself. VM replication sped up our response when we encountered a disaster at our main site, and we often relied on instant VM recovery and instant granular recovery. NAKIVO’s technical support has always been responsive via the chat and all our questions were always investigated to the fullest capacity,” says Rogelio.
About BTC Networks
BTC Networks is an ICT provider established in 1975 in Saudi Arabia. BTC introduced the first and largest digital PABX, the first video conferencing and the largest data network in the Kingdom, as well as other breakthrough products and solutions. As a result, the company takes pride in playing a direct role in connecting millions of people together and servicing all market segments by providing state-of-the-art products and customized solutions. Today, BTC Networks is acknowledged as one of the largest integrated ICT solution providers in the Middle East, with branches in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. For more information, please visit www.btcnetworks.net.