NAKIVO Enhances the Data Protection Strategy of a Research Facility
Business Challenge
The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) is a research facility composed of science-driven ocean observation platforms and sensors in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The instrumented arrays gather physical, chemical, geological, and biological data from the air-sea interface to the seafloor, providing a wealth of information for research and education. The data collected is transmitted through a cyberinfrastructure, making it possible for anyone with an internet connection to download ocean data in real time.
OOI’s infrastructure consists of a multi-petabyte Dell VxRail cluster for production, a second multi-petabyte Dell VxRail cluster for development, a multi-petabyte Dell Isilon for raw data storage, a Dell EMC ML3 tape library, and an Apache Cassandra database cluster. The production virtual machines are responsible for receiving and processing data 24/7 from 800 instruments distributed throughout the ocean through various communication channels. A separate set of virtual machines provides the web interface that allows the public access to view and download data sets. Additionally, OOI has multiple copies of the environment for user acceptance testing and development. The ability to swiftly recover production virtual machines in a disaster situation is absolutely critical to ensure that data remains available.
OOI relies on a tape backup system for protecting their environment. OOI decided to look for an auxiliary VM backup solution to avoid potential bottlenecks when restoring a virtual machine from tape if the tape backup system is occupied with a backup of a multi-PB raw data set. For OOI, the raw data backups should to complete successfully to be archived offsite at regular intervals. With the tape backup system, recovering a single VM swiftly was also difficult without impacting the existing backup schedule. The main criteria for a VM backup solution for OOI was integration with VMWare and the NFS protocol, as well as cloud storage as a backup target.
Solution
OOI required an additional solution to build on their tape backup strategy. The main objectives of a new solution were quick backup, instant restore of virtual machines and backup archiving in the cloud for long term storage.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication offered OOI reliable VM backup, fast VM recovery, and ease of management and use. “The deployment of NAKIVO’s Director was extremely easy and I was able to deploy it in our environment in minutes,” says Casey Dinsmoe, DevOps Engineer at the OOI. “The user interface was self-explanatory and I was able to start testing jobs shortly thereafter. Overall, we are happy with the performance and small footprint of NAKIVO Backup & Replication and the product’s ability to back up and recover VMs. Ease of configuration and use, the ability to scale out, as well as the ability to increase parallel backup jobs performance is a big advantage for us.”
“Technical support provided free interactive sessions with technical leads, who provided guidance on the features and configuration of the software. With the assistance of NAKIVO’s technical support team, we were able to quickly scale the product out, in order to deploy a highly resilient and performing VM backup solution,” says Casey. “The deployment of NAKIVO Backup & Replication was simple and technical support provided excellent recommendations on how to leverage the software to take advantage of the high speed storage and networking in our environment. NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a backup solution that provides us with high performance, full VM recovery, and file restore, which can be done in a short time, without interrupting the tape backup system,” says Casey.
“The ability to swiftly back up many multi-TB virtual machines by leveraging VMWare CBT, coupled with the ability to quickly restore a full virtual machine and individual files, has vastly reduced the time needed for us to recover from a virtual machine failure or corruption,” says Casey. “In addition, the ability of NAKIVO Backup & Replication to automatically verify backups provides peace of mind that the backup was not only executed but also executed correctly without corruption, which vastly improves the chances that the backup can be used for recovery in the future.”
Results
“NAKIVO Backup & Replication has helped us save time on backup administration by being extremely straightforward to deploy and operate,” says Casey. “The free consulting sessions with highly trained technicians provided assistance with configuring NAKIVO Backup & Replication, to make the best use of our high speed network and storage, without adding unnecessary load on our production systems. These sessions significantly reduced the time for deployment and provided accelerated training for our IT staff.”
About Ocean Observatories Initiative
The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) is a science-driven ocean observation network, which delivers real-time data from more than 800 instruments to address critical science questions regarding the world’s oceans. Funded by the National Science Foundation to encourage scientific investigation, OOI data is freely available online to anyone with an internet connection. The OOI consists of five arrays that are continually collecting data about ocean conditions. For more information, visit oceanobservatories.org.