NAKIVO Helps a College in NY Save $15,000 in Backup Costs
Business Challenge
Russell Sage College is a co-ed college with two campuses located in Albany and Troy, New York, USA. The college offers a wide range of undergraduate and graduate degrees along with several certificate programs. Margaret Slocum Sage founded the college in 1916 and named the college after her husband Russell Sage.
At Russell Sage College, there are 2 sites – one located in Albany and the other located in Troy – with 12 physical hosts and approximately 263 virtual machines. The VMs store student and staff personal data, historical data, and images. When it comes to applications, some of the VMs act as domain controllers and run monitoring software, imaging and bootstrapping applications, the online learning platform, among other uses.
As an educational institution, the college deals with a huge amount of student data that needs to be backed up and recovered in a timely manner, especially the online learning platform and information management systems on the department’s servers, which handle critical student and staffing information. In order to achieve an uninterrupted teaching experience for some students 2,500 undergraduate and graduate students, the college always looks for new ways to safeguard critical data with reliable products.
Previously, the college protected critical data with another VM backup product. As that product became too expensive to maintain for the college, and adding extra disaster recovery functionalities was completely out of the IT team’s budget, the school was on the lookout for a new VM backup solution.
Solution
Currently, Russell Sage College relies on NAKIVO Backup & Replication to ensure that students, staff, and teachers have uninterrupted access to all their data and systems. The college selected NAKIVO Backup & Replication due to the product’s flexible pricing, ease of installation and setup, and disaster recovery functionalities.
“The installation and setup were flawless compared to the other solutions. We were up and running in about ten minutes or less. The web interface is easy to navigate and user-friendly,” says Zaheer Ahmad, Network Administrator at Russell Sage College. “We installed NAKIVO Backup & Replication on a VM, but the product offers a wide variety of installation options that we can use in the future.”
NAKIVO Backup & Replication allows organizations to use backup repositories that support immutability to prevent backup data encryption or corruption. Immutability eliminates the risk of accidental or intentional deletions. “The ability to easily deploy Transporters and add backup storage is amazing. One of our favorite features is the ability to make the backups immutable, without extra steps. An immutable storage option was not available with the previous solution unless we paid extra,” says Zaheer.
In terms of disaster recovery, NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides Site Recovery functionality for maintaining operations at a secondary site. This functionality ensures comprehensive disaster recovery planning and swift failover/failback without data loss. “Since we have two separate sites, disaster recovery planning for emergency purposes is the number one priority. We can recover VMs in minutes, easily create VM replicas, and perform disaster recovery testing,” says Zaheer.
Results
NAKIVO Backup & Replication protects critical data at Russell Sage College while helping preserve the work of both faculty and students. As NAKIVO Backup & Replication protects against data loss, the college can facilitate learning and research services as well. With immutable backups, the college is protected against cyberattacks and ransomware. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication saved us $15,000 when we switched from the previous solution. NAKIVO’s technical support has also been phenomenal. They provide quick and helpful responses and solutions to all of our issues and they follow up often, so you never miss a response. The IT team also saved valuable time due to the product’s user-friendly interface and agentless technology,” says Zaheer.
About Russell Sage College
Russell Sage College is a coeducational undergraduate and graduate college with campuses in two thriving cities: Albany and Troy, New York. Students here receive a hands-on education with small classes, caring faculty, and unwavering student support. For more than 100 years, Russell Sage College has been transforming lives. For more information, visit www.sage.edu.