Radisson Park Inn Hotel Reduces VM Backup Storage by 3X with NAKIVO's Global Data Deduplication

Business Challenge

The IT infrastructure at Radisson Park Inn hotel in Tallinn runs on VMware: "Almost all of our mission-critical services are virtualized," 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 Roland.

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 Roland. "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. 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" says Roland. That is why, Roland began looking for a replacement to their existing VM backup solution that would meet the company’s requirements.

Solution

NAKIVO Backup & Replication was recommended to Roland by Telegrupp AS – a leading system integrator and IT solution provider in Estonia that specializes in providing a wide range of IT services and products.

First off, Roland was impressed with the ease of deployment of the product. "We installed and configured NAKIVO Backup & Replication within minutes. All required components – like the database – were already there, all features worked out the box, and we did not have to deploy any agents," says Roland.

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 Roland. "Setting up new backup jobs was a breeze."

Built for virtualization, 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 Roland.

After running a number of backup jobs, Roland 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. We achieved 3X reduction in storage space!" says Roland. NAKIVO Backup & Replication automatically deduplicates 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 Roland. 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, Roland 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 Roland.

Results

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," says Roland.

Due to global data deduplication and compression, Radisson Park Inn Hotel has reduced backup storage space by 3X. "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.

Company Profile

Radisson Hotels is an international hotel chain company that was founded in 1909 in Minnessota, USA. Radisson Hotels are featured in the world’s most desirable destinations across the globe, with the majority of the hotels located in the United States. There are several Radisson brands, including Radisson Blu, Park Inn by Radisson, Park Plaza, Country Inns and Suits, and Raddison RED. The World of Radisson includes a range of features tailored to the needs of busy travelers. What makes Radisson a world’s leading full-service hotel brand is not only the round the clock range of guest touch point communication tools and physical attributes, but also it is about treating every guest in the way they would expect and deserve to be treated. For more information, visit www.radissonhotels.com.