NAKIVO Saves Storage Space by 60% for a Market Research Company
Business Challenge
Kantar Switzerland has been delivering representative TV and online viewer ratings for the Swiss market since 2013. The company has two locations in Switzerland and their IT infrastructure is composed of 200 ESXi servers, all running on VMware. 90% of the virtual machines run Linux OSs, while 10% run Microsoft Oracle databases. Essentially, all virtual machines (production or testing) require daily backup. Without proper backups, the company would risk losing data and the time that is needed to rebuild a VM from scratch. For Kantar, it is important to have a reliable VM backup solution that works without any issues.
Kantar had relied on another VM backup solution that protected the company’s data and applications in the past. When the licensing policies of the previous solution changed, it became rather expensive for Kantar. “We would have to purchase a higher amount of licenses, according to the new rules, thus increasing our cost, and that became a serious disadvantage,” says David Honsberger, Head of ICT at Kantar Switzerland. “After evaluating three different products, we have decided to select NAKIVO Backup & Replication due to the product’s simplicity, customer references, and lower pricing,” says David.
Solution
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides Kantar Switzerland with a reliable and easy-to-use solution at a good price point, thus ensuring smooth daily operations for the business. NAKIVO Backup & Replication allowed Kantar to better manage their IT budget and ensure data availability. NAKIVO Backup & Replication prides itself in providing ease of access and management with a variety of installation options and a flexible web interface. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication is easy to set up, even when you have multiple locations. The documentation is well made and explains properly how to install and configure the product. Additionally to that, we had an on-boarding with NAKIVO’s engineer to ensure we did everything correctly,” says David.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides image-based, incremental, and application- aware backup of VMware VMs. “We back up all our VMs on a daily basis. This is done with three different jobs per location. The complete process takes less than one hour per location to back up around 100 VMs. What I personally enjoy most is an integrated chat in web user interface and easy-to-use API (we use the API) to check the backup result in the monitoring solution,” says David. Global data deduplication allows Kantar to reduce the backup size by excluding the duplicate data blocks from the backup. “Global data deduplication saved our storage space by 60%. This is great!”
Results
“NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides us with simplicity and clarity due to the awesome web user interface, while the licensing structure is clear and does not change out of the blue. The software does exactly what is being advertised. The licensing with our previous solution was a pain due to the different renewal periods, while with NAKIVO Backup & Replication everything is much simpler and of course less expensive. NAKIVO’s support is fantastic and not just wanting to close the ticket, but provide a real solution,” says David.
About Kantar Switzerland
Kantar has a leading role as a provider of the official TV Audience Measurement Service in Switzerland. Kantar runs a panel of 2,000 households across the three linguistic regions. Each household is equipped with a PeopleMeter 5000 to measure TV consumption and a FocalMeter to measure online usage, to provide a comprehensive picture of cross-media usage. The company’s local expertise includes TV audience measurement, online video measurement, and together with a local Swiss partner they provide media monitoring as well. For more information, visit www.kantar.com.