NAKIVO Helps Telecommunication Service Provider Centralize their Environement

GCA Telecom, a telecommunication service provider from El Salvador, centralizes their environment and saves at least one hour per day on backup administration with NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed on a Synology NAS.

www.gcatelecom.com.sv

Business Challenge

GCA Telecom has been operating in the telecom market since 1998, providing both local and long distance telephone services since then. GCA Telecom was one of the first privately owned telephone companies to operate in El Salvador. In the last few years, as technology has changed, the company began providing other services, including GPON fiber data services and VOIP services.

GCA Telecom operates out of four branches across EL Salvador. Currently, the company has three physical servers located at their main site. Virtual machines store data for the company’s internal use, and for services provided to their customers. For the internal use, the accounting system and billing system must be available for successful daily operations. Meanwhile, the company’s customers must have VOIP services, prepaid calling services, web hosting, and email services available without any interruptions or downtime.

For example, if anything should happen to their email server, GCA Telecom would want to restore that server immediately with minimum data loss. However, if emails were in fact lost, the company would of course begin to lose their customers. Moreover, due to regulations, historical data must be kept for at least one year. As a service provider, GCA Telecom does not have the luxury of losing their data, thus backup and recovery are critically important.

Before virtualizing their environment, GCA Telecom had ten physical servers, and each server had a RAID configuration and an external backup disk. Basically, with their past configuration, the IT team had to administer ten physical servers every day and check that the backups had finished successfully. Sometimes, failed backups were an issue since servers were already occupied performing other tasks. The whole procedure was not centralized and each server had its own characteristics and problems. Overall, the company experience long backup and recovery times and too much time was spent on babysitting these backups. The main goal of GCA Telecom was to reduce the number of physical servers in use, and deploy a simple and centralized VM backup solution that could be installed on their Synology NAS.

Solution

Since GCA Telecom wanted a VM backup solution to be compatible with their existing Synology NAS server, NAKIVO Backup & Replication was the ideal choice for the company. “We did not want to have another Linux server just to make backups of the other Linux and Windows servers. That is why, thanks to NAKIVO Backup & Replication integration with our Synology NAS, installation was a breeze and did not take any time at all. We spent some time on configuration, as we were not yet familiar with the product. The support team was most helpful in setting everything up, and explaining everything to us,” says Jose Belarmino Jaime, Executive Director at GCA Telecom.

“NAKIVO Backup & Replication is installed on our Synology NAS, which is convenient for us, since we already had this server for our network backups, and did not have to invest in any other hardware. NAKIVO Backup & Replication’s web interface is hosted on the Synology NAS and we do not need to worry about servers or services, should we need to install NAKIVO Backup & Replication on a Linux machine,” says Jose.

With the new VM backup solution, GCA Telecom protects their VMs and data with forever-incremental backups and is able to store recovery points on a weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. Moreover, the company can now also schedule backup jobs at any convenient time. “Three hours are needed now to back up all our servers, and forever-incremental backup is super handy for us in not only saving backup time, but also saving disk space. Recovery points are also useful for us, should something go wrong when we make changes to the servers. NAKIVO Backup & Replication is, in fact, extremely easy to use and you do not need to be an expert in backups/recoveries. Once everything is configured, the product does its job for you,” says Jose.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication has allowed GCA Telecom to centralize all company processes with little supervision from the IT team, and reduce the number of servers from ten to three. The simplicity of VM replication has also allowed the company to replicate their VMs from the main office to other branches, so that quick recovery in just a few clicks is possible, in case of a disaster. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed on our Synology NAS has reduced backup administration time for us, given all that time that we had to spend monitoring our ten physical servers. Due to the product’s efficiency and functionality, we’ve decided to eliminate several physical servers and virtualized our environment,” says Jose.

Results

NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed on a Synology NAS provides GCA Telecom with a centralized environment, automated and forever-incremental backups, and less time required for backup administration. NAKIVO Backup & Replication offloaded the burden of supervising ten physical servers for the IT team, thus saving them at least one hour every day. With the previous setup, everything had to be done manually; with NAKIVO Backup & Replication, backups now can be scheduled at a particular time, and with forever-incremental backup, backup time is much shorter. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication provided three advantages for us. Firstly, we managed to reduce the number of physical servers from ten to three, thus consuming less energy. Secondly, we reduced our own working hours in supervising those ten physical servers, thus saving us at least one hour per day. Lastly, we saved space that was previously occupied by the ten physical servers and its external backup disks,” says Jose.

About GCA Telecom

GCA Telecom is the first private telecommunication services company in El Salvador, operating since 1998. The company has more than 2,000 customers in both El Salvador and abroad who have chosen GCA Telecom to cover their telecommunication services requirements nationwide. The company provides its customers with Fiber Optic Internet, PBX virtual services, E-1 digital connection services, residential and corporate telephone services, IP services, and video surveillance services. For more information, please visit www.gcatelecom.com.sv.