Case study: How did this major hotel reduce VM backup storage by 3x?

In today's increasingly digital world, it has become vital for businesses to keep up with the ongoing trend of virtualisation. It's the same story for Radisson Park Inn Hotel in Tallinn, Estonia, where the IT infrastructure runs on VMware.

"Almost all of our mission-critical services are virtualised," says Roland Kalijurand, IT manager at the Radisson Park Inn Hotel. "Most of our VMware VMs are Windows servers with SQL databases that run different services and operations, necessary for the successful hotel management and daily operation," says Kalijurand.

All services at Radisson Park Inn require stable and dependable data protection. Safeguarding virtual infrastructure that supports hotel internal processes and contains customer's personal information is highly important to Kalijurand.

"A VM backup solution should be reliable, easy to administer, and provide fast backup and short recovery times," he says.

However, the previous VM backup solution used by Radisson Park Inn failed to meet these requirements.

"Our previous VM backup product was giving us a lot of problems," Kalijurand says. "It was constantly crashing, and we had to spend a lot of time to bring it back to life. But its biggest issue was the amount of storage it needed to perform backups. We needed a better VM backup solution which would be stable and which would not take a lot of storage space.

That is why Kalijurand began looking for a replacement to their existing VM backup solution that would meet the company's requirements.

NAKIVO Backup - Replication was recommended to Roland by Telegrupp AS – a leading system integrator and IT solution provider in Estonia that specialises in providing a wide range of IT services and products. First off, Kalijurand was impressed with the ease of deployment of the product.

"We installed and configured NAKIVO Backup - Replication within minutes," says Kalijurand. "All required components – like the database – were already there, all features worked out of the box and we did not have to deploy any agents.

Furthermore, NAKIVO Backup - Replication features a simple and intuitive Web interface to reduce backup administration complexity.

"In comparison to our past VM backup solution, NAKIVO Backup - Replication proved to be simpler and more flexible," says Kalijurand. "Setting up new backup jobs was a breeze.

Built for virtualisation, NAKIVO Backup - Replication uses native VMware APIs and relies on architecture optimized for performance to deliver highest VM backup speeds.

"NAKIVO Backup - Replication completed VM backup jobs faster than our previous backup solution," says Kalijurand.

After running a number of backup jobs, Kalijurand has compared the size of VM backups created by NAKIVO Backup - Replication to the size of backups created by their previous product.

"The amount of storage space reduction we got with NAKIVO Backup - Replication's was truly awesome," Kalijurand says. "We achieved 3X reduction in storage space!

NAKIVO Backup - Replication automatically de-duplicates backed up data at the block level across entire backup repository and this dramatically reduces the size of VM backups. After data is deduplicated, the product automatically compresses each data block so it occupies even less storage space in the backup repository.

In addition, to performance improvement and storage space reduction, NAKIVO Backup - Replication has also boosted VM recovery time.

"With the Flash VM Boot feature, we were able to recover entire VMs from backups in a matter of seconds," says Kalijurand.

Full VM recovery can be a very long and stressful process that can fail after hours of waiting and will have to be started over again. With the Flash VM Boot feature, VMs can be recovered within seconds by booting them directly from compressed and deduplicated VM backups. Flash VM Boot works out of the box for all VM backups and does not require any special recovery environment.

After a long evaluation and testing period, Kalijurand was satisfied with NAKIVO Backup - Replication reliability as backup jobs ran successfully and the product did not crash or need any administration.

"NAKIVO Backup - Replication turned out to be perfect for us: the product proved to deliver fast and reliable VM backups, saved storage space with deduplication and compression, and improved VM recovery time," says Kalijurand.

Radisson Park Inn hotel now uses NAKIVO Backup - Replication to protect and recover their business-critical VMware VMs.

"NAKIVO Backup - Replication proved to be superior to our previous VM backup solution, reducing our backup storage space by 3X," says Roland. "We have also significantly improved our recovery time as we can now near-instantly recover VMs directly from the backup repository with Flash VM Boot," says Roland.

NAKIVO develops a fast, reliable, and affordable data protection solution for VMware and cloud environments. As of Q1 2016, over 13,000 companies are using NAKIVO Backup - Replication to protect and recover their data more efficiently and cost effectively. Also, over 120 hosting, managed, and cloud services providers are using NAKIVO to deliver VM BaaS, and DRaaS to their customers. NAKIVO has a global presence with over 1,100 channel partners in 112 countries worldwide. Click here to learn more.