NAKIVO Saves Time on VM Backup for a School District
Business Challenge
Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union (OSSU) serves school-age children from pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade in the towns of Craftsbury, Greensboro, Hardwick, Stannard, Wolcott, and Woodbury in the State of Vermont, USA. The school district believes in creating strong student, family, staff, and community partnerships with the goal of providing an education that is relevant and meaningful to each child in the district.
The school district virtualized the IT infrastructure of 52 physical servers and now runs 6 physical servers and 10 virtual machines. VMs store user files, a student information system, and other functional needs systems used for the administration of the district. Backups are stored on the NAS devices at distributed locations. Ease of recovery is key to the disaster recovery procedures that are in place at the schools. As the school district stores a great amount of personal information, backup and recovery are crucial to the success of daily operations.
Before virtualization, tape backups were used for data protection. The main disadvantages were long backup times and slow recoveries. NAKIVO Backup & Replication has been the school’s VM backup solution for four years and replaced backup to tape. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication was the right product for us due to the ease of use and manageability,” says David Martin, Director of Technology and Communications at OSSU.
Solution
As one of the biggest drawbacks of backup to tape was speed, OSSU chose NAKIVO Backup & Replication for fast backups and recoveries. With backup to tape, large amounts of data were backed up extremely slowly, while recovering files also took a long time. NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers faster incremental VM backups and instant VM and granular recoveries.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication is installed on a Synology NAS box to create a backup appliance that combines hardware and software. “The platform is user-friendly and just works. The whole process of installing and configuring was a breeze. The dashboard is also user-friendly. Seeing what is being backed up with the rate and time is a nice feature. Running a job outside of the normal schedule is also painless,” says David.
“From scratch, the initial backup takes four to six hours. After the initial backup, the incremental backup takes less than 30 minutes. The product works. We can easily do a recovery, and notifications provide peace of mind, knowing data is backed up and protected,” says David.
With instant granular recovery, individual files and objects can be easily recovered to their original location or to a new machine. Instant VM recovery, can completely recover entire VMs to production, if needed. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication lets us easily manage instant VM recovery and ensures data is backed up and safe. The ease of use is what sealed the deal. In addition, many times users need a file recovered. Thus, NAKIVO Backup & Replication allows one to easily recover one file or a whole folder,” says David.
Results
By switching from backup to tape to VM backup, OSSU managed to save time on backup. While recovery was previously a long process, now OSSU can easily recover entire VMs and individual files. Lastly, NAKIVO Backup & Replication helped OSSU save time on backup administration because of a user-friendly web interface and notifications center. “Tapes were messy and took too much time. No swapping of tapes and just using NAS boxes has saved us one to three hours weekly. Moreover, technical support has resolved issues quickly and professionally, as they always find the best fix. NAKIVO Backup & Replication has freed up time on backup administration and allows us to easily back up VMs. We now can easily recover and back up and have less headaches than with tape backups,” says David.
About Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union
Schools in Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union exist so that all students are empowered with the knowledge and skills needed to achieve their full potential and become successful, responsible, and contributing members of society- both locally and globally. OSSU serves approximately 1100 students PK-12 across six towns in four counties: Craftsbury and Greensboro in Orleans County, Hardwick and Stannard in Caledonia County, Wolcott in Lamoille County, and Woodbury in Washington County. For more information, visit www.ossu.org.