Data Backup Digest

and cloud computing services, they're certainly on the forefront of IT innovation in the 21st century. As such, it could as no surprise that they were recently selected by a Swiss school to handle their data archives; and they've been able to streamline their systems in ways that administrators never even thought possible.

IT officials with the Kantonsschule Hohe Promenade, or KSHP, explained their setup in a recent interview by saying: "Our single site is comprised of 40 servers: 20 physical servers and 20 ESXi hosts. VMware VMs mainly store web servers. Previously, we had only one web server that ran our website and we had all these dependencies that did not tie well together, so we decided to have a separate virtual machine for each task. VMware VMs are essential because if a disaster strikes, the whole gymnasium administration might not be accessible."

The school ended up trying out several different solutions. File-based backups weren't feasible due to the vast increase in archival sizes, and script-based backups were unable to handle simultaneous archival operations. The team with KSHP ultimately found NAKIVO Backup & Replication and they haven't looked back.

According to KSHP officials: "We use NAKIVO Backup & Replication to perform backups every day and it usually takes around an hour to back up two clusters with three servers each. As for the data deduplication, I need less than 10% of the space to store my backups. Lastly, I tested instant VM recovery and this feature is lightning fast, so I am confident that I will be able to recover our environment without much hardship. In the future, I believe that the backup copy feature could become an important addition for KSHP, with its ability to maintain backup copies onsite, offsite, and in the cloud."

KSHP has benefitted in a number of ways. Firstly, they were able to achieve much greater backup speed and minimize their storage space by a ratio of 10:1. They also enjoy an extra level of protection by sending automated emails when each job has been finished successfully.

Their official statement continued by saying: "The installation was quite easy and the product’s web interface is slick and clean. I was able to make use of the available hardware at the gymnasium, and also gained an all-in-one backup software, hardware, deduplication, compression and backups in one box."

As one of 20 middle schools in the city of Zurich, Switzerland, KSHP, plays a critical role. The fact that it's currently used by over 700 students means it's on the smaller side when compared to some schools in the U.S. and Canada, but it doesn't make their need for data protection any less important. Kantonsschule Hohe Promenade was founded in 1875 and has continued to serve local students in a variety of studies ever since.

For more information on their school, please visit {{https://www.kshp.ch|www.kshp.ch}}. To find out more about NAKIVO and their software, please visit their official website at {{https://www.nakivo.com|www.nakivo.com}}.