NAKIVO Helps Video Game Developer Improve Recovery of Critical VMs

Business Challenge

Nordcurrent is an international publisher and developer of free-to-play and casual games for smartphones, tablets, and PC/Mac. Established in 2002, Nordcurrent is best known for the hit game Cooking Fever, which has been downloaded by almost 200 million users. Other recent Nordcurrent games include Sniper Arena and Murder in the Alps.

Nordcurrent’s IT infrastructure comprises 8 physical servers and 82 internal virtual machines. The virtual machines store communication servers, the source code, and assets management servers. All working content is stored on the servers, thus backup and recovery services are extremely important for the company. Most of the servers must have backups because rebuilding all the content from workstations is complicated and nearly impossible. Any kind of data loss or downtime can impact development time, thus increasing the time of game release.

After virtualizing their environment on VMware, Nordcurrent decided to look for an easy-to-use VM backup solution. The company required wider functionality, including data deduplication, faster backup, and easier recovery.

With Nordcurrent’s previous solution, daily backups were not possible, and the company ran their backups on weekends only. Since the previous solution relied on custom scripts, the IT team had to put more hours into managing the solution. Constant monitoring and rechecking backup health were performed by the IT team. In addition, for recovery, all systems had to be rebuilt from scratch, and only then recovery was possible. Lastly, Nordcurrent did not have data deduplication, incremental backups, or easy scheduling.

Solution

NAKIVO Backup & Replication delivers complete data protection for virtual, physical, cloud, and SaaS environments. The solution allows organizations to manage hundreds of hosts across multiple sites. The solution can be easily deployed on NAS, Windows/Linux, and as a hardened VA/AMI. In less than 5 minutes, you can run the first backup and ensure complete data protection. “We installed NAKIVO Backup & Replication on our Synology NAS, and in just a few clicks, we were ready to run our first backup job,” says Andrej, CTO at Nordcurrent. “The solution works out-of-the-box and requires less attention from the IT team, allowing us to focus on other IT tasks.”

NAKIVO Backup & Replication can run incremental and image-based VMware backups for better efficiency. “Currently, we run daily and weekly backups. VM backup functionality works smoothly and with ease,” says Andrej. “With global data deduplication, we save storage space. While with VMware backup, we can do full and incremental VM backups, use less network traffic, and work in the background, with minimum load on running servers. Overall, we no longer need big data storage to save all our backups, which is great.”

NAKIVO Backup & Replication also allows Nordcurrent to back up workloads to Amazon S3, a cloud storage service. The solution sends backups to Amazon S3 and provides access to those backups from anywhere in the world. “With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we can store large backups in the cloud, which was not possible previously,” says Andrej.

Nordcurrent also takes advantage of instant VM recovery and instant granular recovery. “Once we experienced SAN failure and had to recover a big part of one virtual machine. We were able to recover that VM in a few hours, instead of the several weeks it took us with our previous solution. Instant granular recovery is commonly used, as users often delete files, and we can recover those files in just a few minutes,” says Andrej.

Results

“NAKIVO Backup & Replication helped us achieve ease-of-use and provided us with meaningful features, including incremental backup, global data deduplication, instant VM recovery, and instant granular recovery,” says Andrej. “The solution just works and does not require constant attention from the IT team. Our system administrators can focus on other tasks and improve our infrastructure. The product sends us reports, saves space on disk thanks to data deduplication, and allows us to spend time for other tasks. Recovery of critical VMs within a few hours, after a major failure, is also a huge bonus and time saver.”

About Nordcurrent Group

Established in 2012 in Vlinius, Lithuania, Nordcurrent is a developer and publisher of casual games for smartphones, tablets, and PC/Mac. Nordcurrent has three development studios in Vilnius, as well as in Odesa and Dnipro (Ukraine). During the last 19 years, Nordcurrent has developed more than 50 games for various platforms. The studio’s biggest hit so far is Cooking Fever – a time-management game where players can cook meals and desserts from all over the world. The game has almost 400 million downloads and 15 million monthly active users. For more information, visit www.nordcurrent.com.