Water Management Institution Selects NAKIVO to Ensure Continuity of Services
Business Challenge
Institution des Eaux de la Montagne Noire (IEMN) is a water management institution in southwest France that develops and manages the hydraulic system of the Montagne Noire mountain range. The IEMN’s mission is to produce a sufficient quantity of quality drinking water for municipalities in the region, which in turn distribute that water to their inhabitants. In addition, IEMN provides quality water to meet agricultural irrigation needs in Lauragais. The institution is also responsible for the storage and transportation of water resources.
IEMN’s IT infrastructure consists of two separate sites, five physical servers and 36 virtual machines. Virtual machines store various databases, web servers, web applications, Microsoft Active Directory servers, printing servers and other critical documents. To ensure the continuity of its vital services to all the communities across the Lauragais region, IEMN has to rely on backup and recovery. Time is of essence if a disaster or an outage occurs in the data center and the institution has not time to spare on reinstalling servers or recreating data. Only a reliable VM backup solution designed specifically for virtualized servers can guarantee that IEMN has continuous access to its critical data and applications.
Until recently, IEMN was protecting its data using another VM backup solution available on the market. Since IEMN is being supported by the governmental funding, budget is always a vital concern. “We were not satisfied with the price that the previous vendor offered us. The main criteria for us was honestly the price point because we are very price sensitive. That is why we decided to find a more affordable software that would meet our needs,” says Victor Mendes, System and Network Administrator at IEMN.
Solution
IEMN chose to deploy NAKIVO Backup & Replication to ensure continuous availability of its services. The decision was made based on the software’s comprehensive set of functionalities available at an affordable price. NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers virtual, physical and cloud data protection, in addition to Microsoft Office 365 backup and backup to tape. NAKIVO Backup & Replication can also be installed on a variety of NAS devices, including QNAP, which IEMN already owned.
“NAKIVO Backup & Replication offered us integration with our QNAP TS-983XU-RP and we were amazed at how simple and fast the whole process has been so far. Simplicity is the main advantage of NAKIVO Backup & Replication over all other vendors. We now have a more affordable backup appliance, that is simple to manage and cost-efficient,” explains Victor Mendes.
With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, IEMN enjoys the benefits of forever-incremental backup and network acceleration functionality. “With network acceleration, VM backup speed is increased and network load is reduced. Plus, backup jobs are completed at a faster rate since the amount of data that is transferred over the network is reduced,” says Victor Mendes. “With forever-incremental backup, IEMN can take advantage of the VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology that identifies changed data and transfer only those changes to the backup repository. This functionality increases VM backup speed and saves storage space. Previously, a VM backup of our entire infrastructure was impossible to perform daily. Now, VM backups are done every day and that is awesome.”
With instant file and object recovery, IEMN recovers entire files and Microsoft Exchange objects within minutes. Instant object recovery for Microsoft Exchange makes it possible to recover emails directly from compressed and deduplicated VM backups, without having to recover an entire VM first. You can recover lost, deleted or corrupted files/objects to their original location, download them, or even send them to your email. Finally, IEMN takes advantage of Microsoft Active Directory integration offered by NAKIVO Backup & Replication to align the software with the institution’s security policy and provide admin and guest access to NAKIVO Backup & Replication.
Results
NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed on a QNAP NAS offers IEMN ease-of-use combined with monetary and performance savings. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, IEMN can now back up its entire IT infrastructure daily. Moreover, the institution has the possibility of recovering entire files and objects near instantly. Previously, Microsoft Exchange recovery was only possible via a third party, while now the functionality is supported by NAKIVO Backup & Replication. “Our entire experience with NAKIVO Backup & Replication has been great so far, as we achieved simplicity and improved performance overall. NAKIVO Backup & Replication definitely saved time and money for IEMN,” says Victor Mendes.
About Institution des Eaux de la Montagne Noire (IEMN)
IEMN is an interdepartmental institution born out of the common will of the departments of Aude, Haute-Garonne and Tarn in Franceto create a system that would improve the living conditions and water resources in the Lauragais region. This institution is the fruit of seventy years of history founded on cooperation in the service of the public interest of Lauragais. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Minister of Public Works and Transport became aware of a significant gap between the needs of the Canal du Midi and the average annual contributions of the watercourses of the hydraulic system of the Montagne Noire. Consequently, he approved the creation of a body that would be responsible for setting up a project for the complete development of the hydraulic resources of the Montagne Noire range so as to meet the legitimate needs of the Lauragais populations. Currently, Aude, Haute-Garonne and Tarn continue to work in the same direction to support this project. For more information visit www.i-emn.fr.