NAKIVO, Inc., a fast-growing software company for protecting virtualized and cloud environments, has announced today that Innovabee, an SAP system integrator, has selected NAKIVO Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Virtual infrastructure at Innovabee GmbH consists of 2 datacenters with approximately 200 VMware VMs in a combination of Windows/Linux infrastructure. "Our mission-critical VMs contain about 40TB of data," says Markus Kugler, IT Manager at Innovabee GmbH. "Our datacenters are completely virtualized with a wide range of business and IT services operating on VMware, including Microsoft Exchange 2013, Microsoft Sharepoint, SAP Database Servers, SAP Application Servicers, Fileservers, and SQL-Servers."

All Innovabee services require constant and reliable data protection. Since the company no longer has any physical servers, everything is processed in a virtualized environment, therefore, it is absolutely necessary to protect all 200 VMware VMs. Moreover, it is important for Markus to perform fast daily backups and instantly recover application data from two years ago. "We run daily backups of all our VMs. Very important data, like special databases, are even backed up to tape."

The ideal solution, according to Markus, should not only offer reliable and strong performance, but also be able to handle a heavy load in the least amount of time. However, the previous VM backup solution used by Innovabee failed to meet these requirements. "Our previous solution was very slow and could not handle the load of VMs to process. We were not satisfied with the reliability and speed of the solution. A full backup of our datacenter took hours to complete," says Markus.

"As all our infrastructure is completely virtualized, constantly backing up data is a key success element for our business. However, we were spending more than 18 hours to fully backup just one of our datacenters. We even enabled data deduplication, but that did not help to improve the speed or performance of the solution. We needed a more effective and affordable VM backup solution that could not only perform fast and frequent VM backups that does not take hours, but also offers near-instant recovery of data and applications," says Markus.

The disadvantages of the previous VM backup solution led Markus to investigate other solutions available on the market. Fast and reliable VM backups with a rich feature set were his priorities. Moreover, the next solution would have to be more affordable as well as minimize costs while delivering improved functionality and performance.

After looking for available VM backup products, Markus came across NAKIVO Backup & Replication. Taken back with its simplicity, ease of implementation, and impressive performance, Markus was pleased. "What impressed me was the stunning performance and ease of use on one side, and the price on the other side," he says. "A test drive of NAKIVO showed convincing proof of its superior performance."

"While testing NAKIVO, we noticed a considerable improvement in speed and performance and that was due to data deduplication, efficient data compression, and network acceleration. With deduplication, the product truly reduced the amount of storage space needed to save VM backups, while not only reducing storage capacity requirements, but also boosting the speed of VM backups. With network acceleration, we noticed a considerable reduction in network traffic, that also boosted the average speeds of VM backups," said Markus. "Moreover, we were able to recover entire VMs from backups in a matter of seconds. Flash VM Boot is an exciting feature that enabled near-instant recovery, without recovering entire VMs first," said Markus.

In addition, a big advantage for Innovabee was the ability to deploy NAKIVO on Synology NAS Rackstation RS3614xs+. "The new direct NAS installation feature allowed us to install NAKIVO directly onto a Synology NAS, in an easy and simple manner, while also freeing up virtualized infrastructure resources for other business needs," says Markus.

Installing NAKIVO directly on Synology NAS, not only improved VM backup performance, but also improved manageability with the combination of hardware, software, storage, and data deduplication in a single system. NAKIVO on Synology NAS can backup VMs at up to 1 GB/s, fully utilizing the available NAS bandwidth. Overall, storage space is saved, backups are faster, and bandwidth is fully utilized.

Overall, after a long testing period, NAKIVO Backup & Replication met Markus's requirements and exceeded his expectations: "It is absolutely useful that NAKIVO runs natively on Synology NAS. The file recovery option is also useful for fileservers. The Flash VM Boot allows me to run a VM from backup without restoring it first," says Markus. "NAKIVO Backup & Replication came out on top with the highest VM backup performance, job reliability, and lower overall cost. Our datacenters are now protected and VM backups are performed much faster than with our previous solution."

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is now used to protect the VMware infrastructure at Innovabee GmbH and has immediately demonstrated results in reliability, usability, and performance. "We have now a very reliable backup solution. With NAKIVO screenshot verification, the daily health-check of VM backups can now complete in less than 5 minutes," says Markus.

"The possibility to create a high-performance VM backup appliance with Synology NAS, has tremendously improved backup performance. With NAKIVO on Synology NAS, VM backups now complete within about 1.5 hours instead of 18 hours, a 12X improvement. We achieve near-instant recovery of data and application with Flash VM Boot, and reduce storage space with data deduplication and compression. Lastly, we were able to save costs not only on the backup solution, but also on reducing storage space and the IT administration time," says Markus.