Save the Children Spain Deploys NAKIVO to Simplify Disaster Recovery and Save Costs
Business Challenge
Save the Children Spain is a member of Save the Children International, a non-profit organization that is aimed at making the world a better place for children through better education, health care, and economic opportunities. Nowadays, with 25,000 dedicated staff across 120 countries, Save the Children responds to major emergencies, delivers innovative development programs, and ensures children’s voices are heard through campaigning to build a better future for and with children. Save the Children Spain has 10 locations across Spain and two main datacenters in different locations.
The organization has a hybrid infrastructure with a mix of private cloud services and on-premises servers. A part of the infrastructure is virtualized with nearly 40 virtual machines storing file servers, databases, reporting services, and other applications. The main objective of the IT department is to ensure consistency and reliability of all data. As Save the Children is a non-profit organization, all money spent on projects must be properly justified to donors, while all invoices, transfer orders, and project reports kept safe. That is why data protection is imperative for the organization to continue to be successful in the future. The organization’s goal is to be able to back up all data and services every day and restore those services easily and quickly in case of a disaster.
Until recently, Save the Children Spain was using a different backup product to protect its data. However, the cost of that software was too expensive for a non-profit. The organization also wanted to take advantage of its NAS servers, but the previous software did not support NAS installation. Installation on NAS servers was essential for reducing the overall complexity of the backup strategy and freeing up a server from the environment. When Save the Children understood that the costs of updating its licensing with the vendor were too excessive, and its budget only allowed them to cover a particular number of hosts, it was time to look for an alternative solution. The goal was to save costs, simplify disaster recovery, and achieve simplicity.
Solution
NAKIVO Backup & Replication was Save the Children’s backup solution of choice for several reasons. Not only is NAKIVO Backup & Replication affordable, but the total invoiced price allowed the organization to protect all the virtual hosts with the same functionality that was provided by the previous vendor. Overall, the organization saved money by switching to NAKIVO Backup & Replication. It can now use that money now to finance other projects. Since NAKIVO Backup & Replication is compatible with various NAS servers, Save the Children installed the software on its Synology NAS. This allowed the organization to free up resources and reduce backup strategy complexity.
A backup appliance based on Synology NAS combines backup software, hardware, backup storage, and deduplication. With this installation, there are multiple advantages, including higher performance, smaller backups, faster recovery, and storage space savings. “The previous solution was installed on Windows, but we always wanted to take advantage of already available hardware. The whole installation process was so simple. We just had to add a package manager, find it, and click install. The whole process took 15 minutes at most. With the Synology NAS installation, we freed up production resources that were previously spent on backup,” says Alejandro Canet, IT Project Coordinator at Save the Children Spain.
“Today, a full initial backup takes the organization roughly 24 hours, while a daily incremental backup takes around 3 hours. Storage space is always expensive, so global data deduplication reduced space and saved money on storage systems for Save the Children. Moreover, instant granular recovery is a key functionality that saves a lot of time when recovering files or objects from shared resources,” says Alejandro.
The goal of the IT department was to create a simple disaster recovery strategy with the NAKIVO Backup & Replication functionality. “Simplifying the disaster recovery strategy was our main objective. Today, we can recover data on the same day in a minimum amount of time. We replicate VMs across our datacenters. This allows us to have source VMs and VM replicas. Thus, if we lose one datacenter, we can always power on VMs in another datacenter and the organization will be operational within a few hours. Ensuring near-instant recovery and uninterrupted business operations with NAKIVO Backup & Replication is important for us. NAKIVO Backup & Replication also allows us to keep recovery points for replicas and backups that we can rotate on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis,” says Alejandro.
Results
With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, Save the Children simplified its disaster recovery strategy with VM replication and instant recovery. All data and applications are backed up daily, while VMs are replicated to a different datacenter to ensure near-instant recovery in case of a disaster. With a backup appliance based on Synology NAS, Save the Children freed up its production resources and achieved business continuity. Instant granular recovery is also as simple as opening the web interface, clicking a couple of buttons, and recovery is done in minutes. “The licensing costs that were offered by NAKIVO turned out to be cheaper than the yearly maintenance costs of our previous product. NAKIVO Backup & Replication may be almost 10 times cheaper. Regarding installation and setup time, we just spent 15 minutes and everything was working. With the previous product, installation could be over 2 hours, plus the software was more difficult to use. Overall, we were able to simplify disaster recovery, save costs, and utilize existing NAS servers with NAKIVO Backup & Replication,” says Alejandro.
About Save the Children
Save the Children is a non-profit organization that aims that all children survive, learn, and are protected from violence in Spain and around the world. The organization serves the needs of children and makes sure their voices are heard. Save the Children is present in more than 120 countries and has 10 locations in Spain. The organization receives contributions from partners, institutions, companies, and donors that help build a better and fairer world for children. Save the Children develops health and nutrition programs, education, protection against violence, attention in humanitarian emergencies, and other childhood policies. For more information, visit www.savethechildren.es.