NAKIVO Helps Classic Hotels and Resorts Save 50% on VM Backup Costs
Business Challenge
Classic Hotels and Resorts is a full-service hotel and resort management company with superior resources, located in the southwest of the United States. At Classic Hotels & Resorts, their ambition is to develop a hospitality management company based on superior and enduring relationships with their guests, employees, and owners. Another quality that makes the company so unique is that Classic Hotels & Resorts owns and manages all of their hotels. Currently, the hospitality chain has six properties.
The Arizona Grand Resort is considered the chain’s central location and their corporate office, while the other five locations include hotels/resorts in Arizona and California. The chain’s current workloads run on approximately 85 VMware VMs spread across all six locations. Most of Classic Hotels and Resort’s data is structured data that includes various office files. The chain also runs several databases for property management systems, point of sale systems, and HR systems. Classic Hotels and Resorts are required to keep their data safe, in case of disaster, by PCI compliance, as well as for business continuity purposes. The IT team fully understand that VM backups are the base of successful daily operations for their IT department and that a reliable VM backup solution is a necessity for data protection.
Not so long ago, Classic Hotels and Resorts was reliant on a cloud-based backup solution to protect their VMware VMs. Their main issue with this system was the long recovery time, as data needed to be rehydrated back from the cloud. The cloud-based solution also required significant monetary investment from the hospitably chain. “Our previous solution was not efficient enough, and the cost-benefit failed to deliver the best data protection experience for the money spent,” says Jose M. Solis, Senior Systems/Network Engineer at Classic Resorts and Hotels.
Solution
NAKIVO Backup & Replication became the VM backup solution of choice for the hospitality chain due to the great user reviews on multiple websites across the web. For Classic Hotels and Resorts, NAKIVO Backup & Replication provided complete functionality at a fraction of a cost, in comparison to the other vendors in the industry. Moreover, the product was selected because of its compatibility with different NAS devices, particularly with QNAP. By creating a NAS-based backup appliance, Classic Hotels and Resorts were able to utilize already available hardware together with the newly purchased software.
“Installation on a QNAP NAS is the greatest feature for us. The whole installation process was completed in a matter of minutes. Additionally, we took another 10 minutes to configure the basics and kicked off our first backup job soon after that. The web interface is extremely easy to understand and everything is laid out well. Installation on a QNAP NAS removes the necessity for purchasing dedicated physical servers or VMs that live on a protected environment,” says Jose.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides the hospitality chain with reliable VM backup and data deduplication functionality that is used for storage space reduction. With CBT, VM backup speed is increased for the chain, as only changed data gets transferred to the backup repository. “Due to CBT, we are only backing up the changes that took place after the initial full backup, so forever-incremental backup takes much less time. We enjoy the fact that setting up a new backup job takes only few mouse clicks to complete. Additionally, global data deduplication saves a ton of storage space for us,” says Jose.
With the easy-to-use web interface and email notifications, NAKIVO Backup & Replication requires little monitoring, thus helping the IT team to focus on other pressing IT issues. “With the help of email notifications, we always know when a backup job has been completed. If there are any issues, we also can see them through the email notifications. Then, we just check for new software updates every couple of months to make sure we are using the latest version. Other than that, the software is easy to operate and manage, thus saving us time on backup administration, says Jose.
Results
NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed on a QNAP NAS provides Classic Hotels and Resorts with fast forever-incremental backup, storage space savings, and monetary savings as well. With CBT, VM backup is faster since only changed data gets backed up. Global data deduplication saves storage space for the hospitality chain, while easy-to-use web interface and email notifications save time on backup administration. In terms of monetary savings, Classic Hotels and Resorts saved 50% in that arena. “We calculated a 50% cost reduction by purchasing NAKIVO Backup & Replication. NAKIVO Backup & Replication lets you save on licensing and expensive hardware purchases. We are now at peace knowing that our data is safe and readily available. The fact that we were able to save a ton of money is always something to brag about,” says Jose.
About Classic Hotels and Resorts
Classic Hotels and Resorts is a hospitality company with over 20 years of industry experience, focused on the high-end leisure traveler and group business segments in the southwestern US. Their ultimate goal is to deliver a memorable experience to their guests, while staying at any of their six luxury/boutique hotels, and the company believes they have achieved that in a short amount of time. The hospitality chain continues to grow their portfolio across Arizona and California, and looks forward to increasing their property count at a rate of one to two properties per year in the upcoming months. For more information, please visit www.classichotels.com.