NAKIVO Improves Scalability, Saves Time and Storage Space for a Cloud Service Provider

EverTech, a cloud service provider located in Finland, is using NAKIVO Backup & Replication to back up, replicate, and recover their VMware and Hyper-V VMs, while also saving VM storage space with global data deduplication, decreasing time spent on VM backup administration, and enhancing scalability.

www.evertech.fi

Business Challenge

EverTech is a privately held cloud service provider located in Finland. In January 2015, EverTech became the first company to adopt the container-based datacenters in Finland. Committed to environmentally sustainable policies and services, EverTech’s primary datacenter has a PUE factor of 1.17, and all the energy it consumes carries an EKOenergy-badge. In addition to focusing on SMB companies and communities in general, EverTech offers services to software companies and other service providers as well.

With three datacenters located across Finland, EverTech’s IT environment hosts over 50 physical servers, as well as nearly 500 VMware and Hyper-V VMs. As EverTech is a managed service provider (MSP), multiple customers are running mixed workloads in the company’s datacenters. These workloads may include web servers, application servers, databases, and other services. As the majority of EverTech’s customers are software companies, the data that is stored in the VMs is integral to their successful daily operations. The main goal is to provide customers with IT services that will enable them to operate efficiently and securely, thus it is crucially important to offer VM backup and recovery. EverTech’s customers have the utmost trust in their ability to provide robust IT services, and fast and reliable backup and recovery of their VMs and data is a big part of that promise. If critical data were to become unavailable for any reason, EverTech would risk losing customers and revenue, while also damaging their reputation as a managed service provider.

“In the past, EverTech was using a different VM backup solution. The main problem with the old VM backup solution was the lack of scalability and features, as the software was more suitable for an end-user company, rather than an MSP. Another disadvantage was the lack of a self-service portal that we could use to give access to our customers. We would also sometimes experience failed jobs and slow backup performance. As we have several hundreds of terabytes of data that needs to be backed up on a daily basis, we started searching for a suitable replacement product,” says Pekka Rasi, CTO at EverTech.

Solution

EverTech needed a VM backup solution that would scale better in order to fulfill the demand of the company’s growing customer base. EverTech selected NAKIVO Backup & Replication due to its impressive feature set and an attractive price point in comparison with the other VM backup solutions on the market. The global data deduplication feature, which allows EverTech to save significant storage space, significantly influenced their decision. “Currently, we are using NAKIVO Backup & Replication with our Openstack integrated Hyper-V environment and also with our VMware vSphere environment. The product was extremely easy to install and configure and the web interface is responsive and intuitive,” says Pekka.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers a multitude of features that are useful for a managed cloud service provider, in addition to multi-tenancy and its self-service portal. EverTech takes advantage of VM backup, VM replication, and VM recovery functionality. “With VM backup for VMware and Hyper-V VMs, we can protect our customer’s data in a fast and reliable way. We run backup jobs every night and they typically finish during the night time. We appreciate the email notifications and reports on backup jobs completion. With VM replication, we replicate most of our critical VMs between our three sites for disaster recovery purposes. Network acceleration helps us back up and replicate VMs faster between our three datacenters. And instant VM recovery provides us with a near-instant way to recover VMs and then get them up and running fast,” says Pekka.

As mentioned earlier, global data deduplication made the most impact on EverTech, as this feature saves a significant amount of disk space for the organization. “Global data deduplication is an extremely useful feature for us because we have hundreds of terabytes of data that we need to back up. The functionality helps us save storage space, thus we can store more VM backups,” says Pekka.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers multi-tenancy, which enables EverTech to create isolated tenants within a single instance of the product, and a self-service portal, which offloads data protection tasks to Evertech’s customers. “With multi-tenancy, we ultimately deliver Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS), Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS), and Replication-as-a-Service (RaaS) for VMware and Hyper-VM environments more efficiently and cost-effectively to our customers. With the self-service portal, we finally can provide our customers access to their own IT environment, so that they can schedule and run their own VM backup or VM replication jobs, or perform instant VM recovery,” says Pekka.

Results

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides EverTech with several features that are important for a managed cloud service provider. EverTech can back up, replicate, and near-instantly recover VMware and Hyper-V VMs. With global data deduplication, the company also saves significant storage space, and with the product’s self-service portal, EverTech saves time and improves manageability. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication helped us solve the scalability problems that we experienced with our previous VM backup solution. We have all these great features, we save a ton of disk space, and we now have the ability to offer a self-service portal to our customers for managing their backups. NAKIVO Backup & Replication helped us save more than 50% of our time on backup administration, and it’s only a third of the price of our previous VM backup solution,” reports Pekka.

About EverTech

EverTech is a privately held Finnish cloud service provider. EverTech was founded in 2012 and today they serve customers from their three datacenters throughout the country. Their history with datacenters began in 2001, when the team founded Crescom Oy, a Finnish managed hosting services company, later acquired by TeliaSonera. The company’s mission is to find ways for their small and mid-sized business clients to benefit from the new era of digitalization. EverTech’s passion is to provide first-class managed private cloud and hybrid cloud services, as well as managed hosting and datacenter services to the SMB market. The company’s management team members have long-term experience in the ICT services and consulting industry. For more information, please visit www.evertech.fi.