NAKIVO Reduces VM Recovery Time from 48 Hours to Minutes for a Real Estate Development Company

Business Challenge

INTRA is a real estate development company in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. While real estate development is the core business of the company, INTRA also manages different brands in a variety of other industries.

The company's infrastructure is fully virtualized with VMware supporting missioncritical applications such as SAP ERP, Microsoft Exchange, SQL, ORACLE, MySQL, and network monitoring. "To ensure successful daily business operations, we need to always have access to our mission-critical VMs," says Javier Fragoso Fernández, Chief Information Officer at INTRA. "If something goes wrong on any of our servers, such as OS or application corruption, we need to restore in minutes because we can't stop the work of more than 600 people," says Javier.

Previously, INTRA did not have a solution designed to perform VM backups and restores; the only method for backing up VMs was a legacy physical backup solution. While the legacy solution was the primary method of data backup, the recovery process took hours. Moreover, the solution was complicated to use and there was always a high chance of data corruption during restore.

"When crashes happened before, we had to spend hours to manually recover our VMs because we used tape," says Javier. "Going forward, spending hours on recovering data was not tolerable, so we decided to protect ourselves from the threat of losing data and productivity," says Javier. To improve their data recovery process, INTRA decided to move past the physical backup world to a VM backup solution. INTRA started to investigate available VMware VM backup products, giving a high priority to backup and recovery performance, as well as reliability.

Solution

"At first, we evaluated a couple of older VM backup products, but decided to give NAKIVO Backup & Replication a try because we found that it was highly rated on Spiceworks by its users," says Javier. "By the end of our evaluation, it was clear that NAKIVO Backup & Replication was the best option compared to the other products. With one of the fastest VM backup and recovery times, along with near-instant application object recovery, we found our VM backup," says Javier. NAKIVO Backup & Replication also provides the ability to replicate VMs, which enables to near-instantly recover from a disaster.

In comparison to the time-consuming legacy physical server backup method, NAKIVO Backup & Replication was a total upgrade for INTRA. "I cannot believe we were using a physical server backup solution with tape for so long. With NAKIVO, we now have data deduplication that reduces disk space requirements for backups, resulting in significant cost savings. In addition, NAKIVO supports a variety of disk storage devices, which is more efficient than tape during VM recovery," says Javier.

The greatest improvement for INTRA was in the area of data recovery. After spending hours to recover from a crash, it was vital for INTRA to shorten their recovery process. "With Flash VM Boot, I can now recover a VM in a few minutes," says Javier. "I can boot a VM directly from a compressed and deduplicated backup repository, without recovering the entire VM first, and the recovered VM can be migrated to production without downtime," says Javier.

Results

With unprecedented results in ease of use, reliability, and performance, NAKIVO Backup & Replication is now used to protect the entire VMware virtualized infrastructure at INTRA. Flash VM Boot of NAKIVO Backup & Replication has enabled INTRA to substantially reduce VM recovery time from hours to minutes. "We have used NAKIVO Backup & Replication for over a year. In the past year, we had three crashes on different servers. Without NAKIVO, it would have taken around 48 hours of work to recover these VMs, but with NAKIVO we are able to recover each VM in about 5 minutes. However, the overall process of problem identification and preparing a recovery environment took us about 45 minutes. Overall, NAKIVO Backup & Replication has enabled us to recover our VMs about 64X faster versus our previous physical server backup solution," says Javier. "NAKIVO gives us an edge in VM data recovery. This is a huge leap forward and past the physical backup world."

Company Profile

Established in 2002, INTRA is a real estate development company that has established itself not only in the state of Veracruz, but also in the Southeast region of Mexico. INTRA is composed of more than 40 companies that operate under the same objective, generating approximately 1800 direct jobs. Over the years, the company has been responsible for the creation of major real estate complexes in the City and Port of Veracruz. While real estate business is the "core business" of INTRA, other lines of business have emerged, including air transportation, financial services, agricultural business, construction, restaurants, hospitality, and shares. In general, INTRA manages many successful brands, including John Deere, Carl's Junior, Benningan’s Restaurant, iNetworks and others. Overall, INTRA is committed to providing products and services of high quality to meet the needs of many customers, while maintaining a sense of social responsibility and a good working environment. For more information, visit intra.mx.