NAKIVO Helps Medical Institute Ensure Near-Instant Recovery with VM Replication
Business Challenge
Stages of Life Medical Institute is a group medical practice focusing on the diagnosis and treatment of pain and pain-related problems. Employing a holistic approach, the practice treats a variety of pain problems, from headache to foot pain, neuritis to colitis, and other problems. The practice draws many patients from across the United States and frequently receives patients from overseas. In addition to treating headaches, abdominal and back pain, degenerative diseases and trauma, the practice performs many of their own diagnostic modalities.
Stages of Life Medical Institute has one site, 17 virtual machines, and a dedicated NAS server for storing backups. Virtual machines store several applications for electronic health records, laboratory management, inventory management, customer portals and reporting services. The practice also relies on critical applications like Microsoft Active Directory, file servers, electronic health records and laboratory systems. All these applications store critical patient data. Thus the practice needs to create image-based backups several times a day. Therefore, they have always relied heavily on a backup solution to ensure operations continuity at any given time and maintain availability of patient data.
Before virtualizing their environment, Stages of Life Medical Institute had only physical servers and did a standard Windows Server backup. Plus, the practice was storing critical files in the cloud. Moreover, there was no tool in place to manage the complete recovery of critical systems. In case of a disaster, the recovery had to be done manually, making this a long process. Upon complete modernization of their infrastructure, the practice decided that a solution that would support image-based backups, VM replication and instant VM recovery was the only reasonable path going forward.
Solution
NAKIVO Backup & Replication was recommended to Martin Jirkal, Senior IT Infrastructure Manager at Stage of Life Medical Institute, by his peers in the industry. NAKIVO Backup & Replication was a great fit for the practice’s needs given the solution’s unbeatable cost-to-functionality ratio. Moreover, NAKIVO Backup & Replication has great customer reviews across various IT platforms, with a 98% satisfaction rate. NAKIVO Backup & Replication protects data via image-based and incremental backups, allows customers to automate replication jobs, as well as decrease recovery time for full VMs, individual files and application objects. In addition, the software integrates with Microsoft Active Directory for simple user management.
“We deployed NAKIVO Backup & Replication as a pre-configured virtual appliance, and our backups are stored on an independent FreeNAS server. As an industry professional, I had no issues with installation and configuration. The web interface is simple, yet easy to navigate. With the v10 makeover, the interface became even better,” says Martin.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication allows the practice to perform consistent, image-based backups of virtual machines, ensuring that all the data gets captured during backup. “We back up our critical systems several times a day, while most of the infrastructure on a nightly basis, and less critical systems on a weekly basis. Backups scheduled for nighttime usually finish successfully within an hour. The best part of VM backup is the global data deduplication functionality that allows us to have a detailed data retention scheme. Currently, we are using 20 TB of storage and have up to a year of history. The overall data retention configuration is great and super easy to manage,” says Martin.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides Stages of Life Medical Institute with a way to replicate VMs to a remote location, so that in case of a disaster, VM replicas can be powered on at a secondary location. “VM replication is the most critical feature for us. We are replicating VMs on every night, and we have successfully performed several disaster recovery tests, which always worked like a charm. VM replication jobs also take around an hour to complete,” says Martin.
With the previous approach to data protection, the recovery had to be done manually. Now, NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides a near-instant way to recover entire VMs, individual files, and application objects. “The biggest advantage for us is that we can not only rely on our backups, but also that we can recover from our backups as well. If data loss occurs, we can quickly restore from any given time point in the previous months. The peace of mind to the owners is priceless,” says Martin.
Results
NAKIVO Backup & Replication protects the virtual environment of Stages of Life Medical Institute with the help of image-based VM backup, global data deduplication, VM replication, instant VM boot and instant granular recovery. The practice can schedule backups on a daily, nightly and weekly basis and saves significant storage space with global data deduplication. VM replication allows the practice to recover from a disaster with a few clicks, while instant VM recovery helps with recovery of VMs, files, and application objects. “The overall performance of NAKIVO Backup & Replication is amazing. We never had to pay extra for additional functionality that came in the new product versions and that truly counts. The difference between automated image-based VM backups and Windows Server backups is of course indescribable. We never experienced any problems with the solution and NAKIVO’s support is always there to help us,” says Martin.
About Stages of Life Medical Institute
Founded by David S. Klein, MD, Stages of Life Medical Institute is a group medical practice focusing on diagnosis first and foremost. Without an accurate diagnosis, therapeutic intervention is destined to be inadequate. The practice’s purpose and mission are to deliver quality office-based medical services in an unthreatening, relaxed, and friendly atmosphere. For more information, visit www.suffernomore.com.