Ideal Standard standardises in Emea with Nakivo virtual backup

Belgium-based bathroom products manufacturer Ideal Standard has replaced numerous legacy backup products with a single architecture based on Nakivo Backup and Replication, as part of a project to virtualise IT operations across 13 Europe, the Middle East and Africa (Emea).

The move has seen it gain a single view of backup operations across Europe, with restores cut from hours to a few minutes.

The company – which employs 9,500 people and has 18 manufacturing sites – is most of the way through a project to replace country-based IT with an Emea-wide virtualised architecture based on a main datacentre in Frankfurt and local server rooms.

The project has seen a standardisation on VMware virtual machines (VMs), with 150 VMs running on 37 physical machines. This provides IT for 3,700 users who use applications that include Microsoft Office 365, SAP, file and print and financials software.

The backup infrastructure had been a disparate one, in which country admins were responsible for backup – usually tape-based – along with all hardware and software. This resulted in a situation with multiple backup products in use across the company.

Steven Tomney, IT infrastructure team leader at Ideal Standard, said: “We went down the VMware route, so we needed a backup solution to suit. We looked at Veeam, and we like it a lot and had it in use in some places, but it was the cost that put us off. When we found Nakivo, we couldn’t justify the cost of Veaam versus Nakivo.”

Ideal Standard was also offered a hardware-based product by Dell, but Tomney said he thinks the company misquoted for the spec required and that the cost of it was “astronomical”.

Ideal Standard has deployed the Nakivo console to its Frankfurt datacentre. Nakivo Transporter software is also deployed to each ESX server as a virtual application. Each of these backs up data to a local Qnap NAS box as a disk target.

“We can see everything that’s taking place at each site on the main console in Frankfurt. It’s a lot easier to administer and restore times are much better – from several hours from tape to around 15 minutes for a 700GB server in Germany,” said Tomney.

“Previously it wasn’t a unified backup architecture, and restoring from tape meant finding the tape, cataloguing it and restoring the file.”

On first deployment, Nakivo takes a full backup but thereafter it only takes incrementals. Nakivo is a backup product aimed at virtualised environments. It had historically targeted small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), but in the past few years it has also aimed at enterprise customers.

Key rivals such as Veeam have also embraced physical machine backu,p but Nakivo is yet to do so. It supports backup for VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and SQL object recovery.