School District Integrates HPE StoreOnce Catalyst with NAKIVO
Business Challenge
Penn-Harris-Madison School Corporation is a school district located in north-central Indiana, USA. The district is committed to high-quality academic programs with strong teaching staff, current technology, and excellent facilities. The district has consistently been “A” rated by the Indiana Department of Education.
The school district consists of 11 elementary schools, 3 middle schools, and 1 high school, along with an administration building and transportation. Virtual machines are used for all administrative functions and record keeping. If critical data becomes unavailable, education for more than 15,000 students and staff members cannot be maintained. Students will not be able to complete their school tasks, and staff will not have access to documents and files.
The school district’s IT team required a new VM backup solution to replace their old one and ensure that the district’s data and systems are properly protected. With the previous solution, backup jobs failed for no reason, and backups took a long time to complete. Too much time was spent on backup administration and fixing failed backups and recoveries. Successful recovery was not guaranteed, and recovery from a disaster could take days. Lastly, the solution was way too complex to configure.
Solution
The school district chose NAKIVO Backup & Replication to replace their old data protection solution. NAKIVO’s solution was chosen for the integration with HPE StoreOnce Catalyst, which drastically helps reduce backup size with deduplication and speeds up data transfer times. The Catalyst protocol uses source-side deduplication to only transfer unique chunks of data to HPE storage systems. This allows organizations to reduce network load and cut down on storage space requirements.
“Since NAKIVO provided integration with HPE StoreOnce Catalyst, the solution became the best choice for us, allowing smooth and quick integration. The installation process was straightforward and simple with the preconfigured OVA file to deploy the solution in VMware. The web interface is easy to navigate, and not having a client is an extremely nice feature,” says Matt Hapke, Director of Technology.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers incremental backups to transfer only data that has changed since the last backup using native VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology. Thus ensuring that backups are lightweight and storage costs are low.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication also offers data protection automation tools, freeing up time to focus on other core tasks. The solution offers automated scheduling for backups to run daily, weekly, or even as often as every few minutes as well as policy-based data protection. “We enjoy having automated scheduling of our backups and can add new VMs to any backup job at any time,” says Matt. “Moreover, with incremental backups, backup times are way shorter.”
The school district’s previous solution did not provide instant VM recovery, and granular recovery proved to be slow and inefficient. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, critical VMs can be up and running swiftly during any disruption with Flash VM Boot. A VM can be booted directly from backups stored on HPE StoreOnce devices and operations resumed within minutes. With granular recovery, files, folders, and application objects can be recovered from backups. “Instant granular recovery is much faster than with our old backup solution, while instant VM recovery was not even supported. We look forward to taking advantage of this functionality as well,” says Matt.
Results
“Overall, NAKIVO offered us reliable backups and quick recovery of files, folders, and application objects. Thus, backups and recoveries no longer take much time to complete, providing us with effective data protection. Even though we are backing up way more data and servers, we spend less time on backup administration with NAKIVO Backup & Replication,” says Matt. “NAKIVO’s technical support has been responsive to our requests and quick with solutions to our issues,” says Matt.
About Penn-Harris-Madison School Corporation
Located in northern Indiana and named for the three townships it serves, Penn-Harris-Madison School Corporation was formed through consolidation in 1963. The school district serves more than 11,000 students, 11 elementary schools, 3 middle schools, and 1 high school. Over the years, Penn-Harris-Madison has built a reputation for excellence in education that is recognized around the state. The schools provide a safe, nurturing environment that brings out the best in each student. For more information, visit www.phmschools.org.