NAKIVO Enables a Municipality to Back Up VMs 12X Faster
Business Challenge
Raymond is a town in Maine, United States, with a population of approximately 4,000 residents. Raymond is located on Sebago Lake and offers a uniquely peaceful and healthy living environment, with an easy commute to Portland, Maine. The Town Office of Raymond is in charge of promoting community resources, schools, recycling, utilities, post offices, library, and a local business directory. Moreover, the Town Office consists of several departments, including animal control, GIS, code enforcement, public safety, and public works.
Woodbrey Consulting Inc. is currently managing the IT infrastructure of the Town Office of Raymond, Maine. With a virtual environment consisting of two ESXi hosts, the Town Office of Raymond is currently in the process of adding an additional ESXi host to increase the total number of VMware VMs. VMware VMs store data like file and print servers, DNS, FTP, DHCP, web servers, email servers, GIS servers, phone systems with VoIP, as well as municipal software that holds financial information. All public services must be available for residents and visitors to have access to the necessary information regarding schools, housing, public safety, or public works. If the IT infrastructure cannot be backed up and recovered quickly, public services might not be delivered in a timely manner.
“The IT infrastructure at the Town Office of Raymond was protected by a different VM backup solution, but the process of scheduling jobs was complicated, and the user interface was not intuitive. Since backup and recovery was difficult and their pricing was becoming exorbitant, we had no choice but to look for a new VM backup solution that would better support our public services. The Town Office of Raymond required a product that offers high backup performance, forever-incremental backup, convenient scheduling of jobs, and the ability to copy backups offsite including the cloud,” says Kevin Woodbrey, CEO at Woodbrey Consulting Inc.
Solution
By performing a Google search, Kevin discovered NAKIVO Backup & Replication and trialed the product on another client’s environment. After testing the product for some time, Kevin noticed stable and reliable performance, intuitive web interface, and flexibility in scheduling backup jobs. After Kevin decided to switch to NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the software was installed to protect the virtual environment at the Town Office of Raymond. “When we selected a pre-configured virtual appliance, in a couple of clicks, we were able to install the product, connect to the network, browse the web interface, and even schedule the first backup job. NAKIVO Backup & Replication is the easiest product that I have ever installed. The product works exactly as advertised and with excellent instructions, nothing can be missed,” says Kevin.
By switching to NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the Town Office of Raymond improved its VM backup performance and achieved forever-incremental backup. Backup jobs are scheduled to run at night, after the Town Office of Raymond shuts down, and backups are saved to a NAS server. “Obviously, an initial full backup takes some time, but after that, with VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) enabled, the product is just backing up incremental changes. For the first time, it took an hour to back up 500GB of data. With CBT, VM backups finish 12x faster on average and the quickest backup jobs take seconds to complete, while the longest take under five minutes,” says Kevin.
With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the Town Office of Raymond also keeps backup copies offsite, to prevent accidental loss of backups. Having an extra copy of backups offsite, allows the Town Office of Raymond not to worry about recoverability, in case something happens to the primary backups. “To safeguard our primary backups, NAKIVO backup copy job enables us to easily send and keep backup copies offsite, in case a disaster happens,” says Kevin.
Results
NAKIVO Backup & Replication protects the VMware environment of the Town Office of Raymond and enables them to improve VM backup speed and achieve forever-incremental backup. With CBT, VM backups are 12x faster on average and backup jobs finish in under five minutes. With backup copy, the municipality can keep extra copies of backups offsite for disaster recovery. “The biggest saving for the Town Office of Raymond is that the backup window is definitely shorter now with NAKIVO Backup & Replication, in comparison to the previous solution. Moreover, since we are a small municipality and every penny counts, switching to NAKIVO Backup & Replication with its cost save features was the most cost-effective decision. The clean and intuitive web interface makes managing and scheduling backups much easier. My top three things that I like in NAKIVO Backup & Replication are the web interface, forever-incremental backup, and backup copy,” says Kevin.
About Town of Raymond, Maine
Raymond is a growing community that prides itself not only in being a web destination, but also as a beautiful place to live and visit. While Raymond may be a small community with approximately 4,000 residents, the town provides visitors and residents a full array of services. Local businesses supply most of life's necessities, and as host to several renowned businesses, many residents are lucky enough both to live and work in town. The Town of Raymond is located in Maine’s Sebago Lake Region and has a year-round population of 4,436. There are 2 lakes and 5 ponds within Raymond’s geographical boundaries. This waterfront property promotes an active recreation based tourism industry and also accounts for a seasonal increase in population to 12,000. Raymond offers a high quality of life, excellent schools, and has an active community of volunteers, which help sustain a variety of town and school programs. For more information, please visit www.raymondmaine.org.