NAKIVO Helps Radisson Hotel Support Excellent Guest Services

Business Challenge

Radisson Blu Leogrand Hotel, a 5-star hotel in Chisinau, Moldova, offers 143 rooms and suites. The hotel provides a range of amenities, including a convention center, several dining options for the guests, a spa and beauty center, and a casino. Located in the city center, Radisson Blu Leogrand Hotel is within walking distance of many places of interest.

Currently, the hotel operates out of 2 physical sites. The sites have a total of 9 physical servers and 42 virtual machines. Virtual machines store simple files, firewalls, and applications like Microsoft SQL Server and others. Backup and recovery processes are vital for the hotel, as all critical data must be protected for quick recovery in case of a data loss incident. One of the potential outcomes of loss of data is reputational damage. A reliable backup solution should be deployed and running to ensure service availability, ensuring excellent guest services, which is the hotel’s main goal.

In the past, the hotel relied on scheduled tasks for copying data to local storage. There were several issues because of manual procedures. Investigating failed jobs was tedious and even difficult. Long backup and recovery times were common, as well as long times spent on backup administration. The hotel needed a feature-rich solution that was easy to use and would meet the hotel’s budget and corporate standards. The main issue was compliance with the standards imposed by the Radisson Blu. In the end, NAKIVO Backup & Replication prevailed over other solutions considered by the Radisson Blu Leogrand Hotel.

Solution

“When we started our research, we looked at three different VM backup solutions. One solution seemed to be the most advanced product and had an attractive GDPR functionality. However, it was also the most expensive and too difficult to implement,” says Dumitru Danuta, Head of IT Department at Radisson Blue Leogrand Hotel. “In the end, we chose NAKIVO Backup & Replication because of the product’s attractive pricing, intuitiveness, and ease of management. We had a good dialogue with NAKIVO’s technical support during our testing period, and documentation was, in most cases, accurate and easy to find.”

“Updating to newer versions with NAKIVO Backup & Replication has been easy and has worked without errors. The configuration is easy and flexible, both when it comes to backing up servers and creating recovery jobs and monitoring them using the web interface and receiving job completion reports,” says Dumitru. “The user interface is simple and to the point. The front page usually gives the administrator all the information needed. The user interface and the calendar view were nice additions that the competitors did not have.”

“We perform daily VM backup and the longest backup job takes three hours. Backup jobs run at different times during the day, which means that one job is executed early in the morning and the other backup jobs at 10 PM,” says Dumitru. “The feature of automatically adding a server or a disk to the backup job is a pleasant feature, which saves time and helps us avoid forgetting to add a disk or a server to the backup routine.”

NAKIVO Backup & Replication also saves storage space and allows integration with Microsoft Active Directory seamlessly for Radisson Blu Leogrand Hotel. “Active Directory integration saves us time every time one of our IT technicians connects. While with global data deduplication, we saw around 87% storage space savings. This means we save money that otherwise we would have spent on disk drives,” says Dumitru.

“Users sometimes delete a simple file, but fortunately, not often. Users might usually wait hours for a file to be restored because the file is not critical,” says Dumitru, “NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers instant file recovery, which works well, especially recovered files sent by email. We specify the user’s mail address, and the user then receives the recovered file and chooses what to do with that file. This saves our IT department significant time.”

NAKIVO Backup & Replication also helped Radisson Blu Leogrand Hotel with backup administration issues. “Administration of the previous solution was almost non-existing. But NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides a great and simple overview. The web interface and mail reports are also a great way to keep everything simple. Simple sometimes equals time saved, and that is the case in our organization,” says Dumitru.

Results

“NAKIVO Backup & Replication helped us in many ways. By delivering a product that every IT team member is comfortable with managing. NAKIVO Backup & Replication has a simple overview and a web interface, which 90% of the time provides IT staff with the information they need, without having to dive deeper into the product configuration,” says Dumitru. “While doing everything manually, we did not have much visibility, but NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides multiple features that cover all our needs. I definitely saved time by not doing everything manually anymore. NAKIVO Backup & Replication has many other great features that we have not implemented yet, but we plan to investigate them in the near future.”

About Radisson Blu Leogrand Hotel

Radisson Blu is an international chain of hotels operated by Radisson Hotels. With roots going back to the 1960s, the Radisson Blu brand name came into existence in 2009 with a rebranding from Radisson SAS. Radisson hotels can be found in major cities, key airport gateways, and leisure destinations. Located in Chisinau city center, the Radisson Blu Leogrand Hotel is within walking distance of Skytower Business Center and many embassies and businesses. For more information, visit https://www.radissonhotels.com/.