Data Backup Digest

Unless you live in Saudi Arabia, you've likely never heard of The Oxford Partnership. A joint venture between three esteemed colleges in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, The Oxford Partnership, or TOP, is making its way out of obscurity by using NAKIVO Backup & Replication services. They've already reduced their storage space by 75% and hope to see even more improvements as their collaboration continues.

The three colleges included in TOP are Activate Learning Oxford, Moulton College and GEMS Education Solutions. In addition, the formation of TOP has spurred the establishment of four brand new women's colleges throughout the Kingdom of Saudi Arabaia, including Al Jouf Sakaka, Ara, Al Qurayyat and Al-Madinah.

Although the partnership is relatively young, they've already made some tremendous technological leaps throughout the region. Their infrastructure spans four separate sites, each of which includes localized functionality for even more learning opportunities. Sites also feature MPLS networking for remote connectivity, data-sharing and improved collaboration.

Rizwan Majeed, head of IT infrastructure with The Oxford Partnership, spoke about the need for reliable data archival as well as their relatively recent move to virtualization by stating: "VM backup and recovery are extremely important to our organization because thousands of students rely on our IT infrastructure for learning and safe keeping of data and files. We experience challenging conditions, especially in the remote territories, where power is less stable, so having a stable VM backup and recovery solution is of the utmost importance."

He went on to say: "Previously, our students just relied on USB drives to store their data, and it was only a matter of time before a catastrophic loss would have happened. Our strategic IT partner, Cutter Group, has encouraged us to virtualize our infrastructure within each college, to allow students and staff to roam between locations if necessary. A key requirement was to ensure that a robust VM backup solution was in place."

When it came to the topic of their new relationship with NAKIVO, Majeed had nothing but praise. He was quoted as saying: "NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed as a pre-configured virtual appliance is an excellent deployment method for our smaller sites, allowing for consistent and high-performance deployments. This method of deployment is a huge time saver because we simply import and configure NAKIVO Backup & Replication within a few hours of hitting the ground," and "In terms of VM backup, our backup jobs finish within a few hours each evening and we have scheduled screenshot verification and space reclaim during the weekends. We save a significant amount of time in managing and controlling backup jobs, as each new VM deployed within the VMware infrastructure is already incorporated into NAKIVO Backup & Replication."

TOP is also taking advantage of the deduplication services offered by NAKIVO. It is this feature that allowed them to reduce their storage needs on such a large scale. It also streamlines their overall bandwidth usage, minimizes data traffic and leads to faster recovery times in the event an emergency restoration is needed.

For more information on NAKIVO or any of their services, visit their official site at {{https://www.nakivo.com|www.nakivo.com}}.