Integrative Wins New Business with VMware Backup Appliance Based on NAKIVO Backup & Replication

Integrative Global Limited, an IT services company headquartered in Macau (China), created Umbra – a high-performance VMware Backup Appliance based on NAKIVO Backup & Replication – and successfully sells the appliance to customers in Asia and the Caribbean regions.

www.integrative.it

Business Challenge

Founded in 2007, Integrative helps organizations find a way in the maze of today’s technologies to build an IT infrastructure that makes business sense. The goal is to deliver real-world infrastructure solutions that meet business requirements of customers worldwide. Integrative’s team possesses experience in systems management, infrastructure optimization, DR planning and implementation, database optimization, infrastructure design, security, and compliance.

"We offer a variety of services and solutions to our customers," says Jeroen Kool, Technical Director at Integrative Global Ltd. "At Integrative, we take all available building blocks and objectivity into consideration, when selecting the right technologies and vendors to fit our customer requirements. Our team offers in-depth knowledge and a full range of capabilities to help today's IT leaders tackle their toughest challenges, from strategies that ensure their IT delivers real value, to new approaches for attaining meaningful IT transformation. Integrative focuses on integrating open-source solutions into propitiatory infrastructure to increase operational efficiency while reducing costs," says Mr. Kool.

Most customers come to Integrative in search for a new backup solution to protect their virtual environments and Integrative plays a key role in leading them to the right solution. "Our customers are looking not only for a basic VM backup solution, most require VM replication, backup copy, and VM disaster recovery features," says Mr. Kool.

Integrative's customers are searching for an alternative backup solution because of both financial and technical reasons. "Some organizations have tight budgets, so we need to offer a solution according to their budget requirements. Other organizations experience various technical challenges with in place solutions and are just tired of ongoing issues. Most common issues are long backup time, long recovery time, and time-consuming maintenance of the backup solution itself. For example, one customer was upgrading a backup tool to the newest version and, after the update, recovery from older VM backups was not possible anymore, a total show stopper" says Mr. Kool.

Solution

"We found NAKIVO Backup & Replication particularly interesting because the product runs on Linux which fits into our open-source integration strategy. That was a key reason to start developing a relationship with NAKIVO," says Mr. Kool. Since most of Integrative’s customers were looking for an appliance type solution, Integrative decided to develop a high-performance VMware backup appliance based on NAKIVO Backup & Replication. The main advantage of the VMware backup appliance is that end users do not need to worry about managing the backup system itself, they only need to use its functionality.

"Our VMware backup appliance is called Umbra (Unified Managed Backup & Recovery), and it's built on Supermicro enterprise grade servers running a custom build of Ubuntu and use the ZFS file system as the underlying storage infrastructure. The core of the appliance is NAKIVO Backup & Replication, which provides VM backup, replication, and recovery. The Umbra appliance is available in three sizes: medium, large, and extra-large to make it simple for our customers," says Mr. Kool. "Normally, we work with large data sets, so our smallest VMware backup appliance is 80 TB (before compression and deduplication), going up to half of PetaByte from there."

Integrative’s customers switch to NAKIVO Backup & Replication because of the product’s simplicity, manageability, and user-friendliness. "NAKIVO Backup & Replication is just a simple product to operate. When we evaluated other competitive products, we found they are just too complex to set up, maintain, and administer. Our customers want to switch to NAKIVO Backup & Replication mainly because they are fed up with constant technical issues and just want a user-friendly software that works,” says Mr. Kool.

Integrative’s customers especially appreciate the VM replication and data deduplication features that NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers. "Our customers see tremendous value from replicating VMs from one datacenter to another, the speed of VM replication is fast due to the in-line compression for data in flight. The data deduplication and compression at rest is good, on average we see a space reduction up to 60% for our customers," says Mr. Kool.

Integrative is quite successful in expanding business with NAKIVO Backup & Replication. "We are a small company, but we are steadily growing. Recently, we sold our first extra-large VMware backup appliance in Macao, China and that will lead to additional business. The NAKIVO Backup & Replication feature set makes the product attractive to customers to choose over other data protection solutions. Partnering with NAKIVO introduced us and our services to many new customers in Asia. In particular, we see considerable developments in the casino industry and with telco, utilities, and finance companies," says Mr. Kool.

Results

Integrative is now a NAKIVO Silver Solution Partner. "We have been actively working with NAKIVO for the last half a year and so far performed five large installations. All our customers are from Asia and the Caribbean. I believe that NAKIVO is truly involved in our partnership and is responsive to questions and suggestions. Experience with NAKIVO has been great because their team works with us to create new business and deliver the product to our customers," says Mr. Kool.

The general feedback of Integrative’s customers is that NAKIVO Backup & Replication works. "Our customers are impressed with the simplicity of the product. The biggest response comes when they actually need to restore a VM or a file. Then they see the true value in the quick and reliable data recoverability," says Mr. Kool.

Company Profile

Headquartered in Macau SAR, Integrative Global Limited was founded on the island of Curacao (Dutch Caribbean) in 2007, with presence in APAC (Hong Kong and Macau), EMEA (NL/UK), and the Americas. The consultants at Integrative have decades of experience in IT infrastructure management, telecommunications, cloud computing, financial services, reinsurance, hospitality, and on-line entertainment. The core of Integrative is a close knitted network of globally positioned partners each working as an independent advisor and technology evangelist. Each partner has at least 20 years of experience in his or her field and has developed a broad skillset and strategic vision. Integrative helps organizations find a way in the maze of today’s technologies to build an IT Infrastructure that makes business sense, even if that means selling less equipment or services. The services of Integrative range from IT Strategy and managerial support in the form of virtual CIO and CTO roles to architectural design, security audits, procurement management, project management, and delivery of services and solutions. For more information, visit www.integrative.it.