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NAKIVO Inc., a fast-growing software company for protecting virtualized and cloud environments, has announced today that The Oxford Partnership, a partnership of three colleges in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has selected NAKIVO Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.
The Oxford Partnership (TOP) brings together three exceptional education and training providers in Activate Learning Oxford, GEMS Education Solutions, and Moulton College. In addition, this powerful partnership has established four women’s colleges in the North of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia namely, Al Jouf Sakaka, Arar and Al Qurayyat, and Al-Madinah.
The IT infrastructure at The Oxford Partnership (TOP) is comprised of four sites that are located across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and each site has a local IT environment for both students and teachers. “Each site has a VMware vSphere cluster with two to three ESXi hosts and an iSCSI SAN. Each site is connected using MPLS to allow collaboration and sharing of data," says Rizwan Majeed, Head of IT Infrastructure at The Oxford Partnership.
Each site at TOP follows a standard configuration model, providing the following services to the local users: directory services, file services, print services, as well as System Center Configuration Manager for machine configuration and package deployment. “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,” says Rizwan.
The previous method of data protection at TOP was basically non-existent. “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,” says Rizwan.
Cutter Group recommended NAKIVO Backup & Replication as a possible VM backup solution for TOP. “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. In addition, not having to install a console or an application to integrate with the product, allows multiple administrators to have a view of the system,” says Rizwan.
"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,” says Rizwan.
“We particularly like the global data deduplication feature, which allows us to make huge disk space savings. We are seeing storage space reduction of 75% within each NAKIVO Backup & Replication deployment. This is excellent as it allows us to increase the number of our retention points without sacrificing much more space,” says Rizwan.
TOP has also been able to improve VM recovery. “We have extensively tested the Instant VM recovery feature. Waiting for full VM restores across a LAN is still an extremely slow process, when users are demanding access to the systems. In our tests, Instant VM recovery was able to reduce this window and deliver the restored services to users much faster. We have been fortunate to not need to recover the entire VMs in the production and only used this feature for disaster recovery testing and we are able to see impressive performance from NAKIVO Backup & Replication,” says Rizwan.
“NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides a simple, yet powerful VM backup solution that is fully equipped to solve various backup and recovery challenges. Convincing users to store their data in a centralized way was a cultural shift to what they were used to with a previous data protection method. Once convinced, we observed a huge increase on data demands and NAKIVO Backup & Replication easily scaled to meet this requirement. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we can now confidently restore and support our users with their ever-increasing data demands,” says Rizwan.
RESOURCES
Datasheet: nakivo.com/resources/nakivo-vm-backup-datasheet.pdf;
Success Stories: nakivo.com/customers/success-story.html;
Trial Download: nakivo.com/vmware/vmware-backup-trial.html;
About The Oxford Partnership (TOP)
The Oxford Partnership (top.ic.edu.sa) is comprised of three organizations that are recognized internationally for excellence. The Oxford Partnership brings together Activate Learning, GEMS Education Solutions, and Moulton College. The partnership is passionate about education and the power of learning, and combines expertise in learning approaches with international education experience and excellence in industry-specific vocational routes. Activate Learning is judged to be good with outstanding areas by Ofsted (Jan 14). GEMS Education Solutions’ already manages education institutions in the UK and has increased trainee attendance and outcomes. Moulton College is rated as outstanding by Ofsted and supports over 7,000 trainees a year.
About NAKIVO
Headquartered in Silicon Valley, NAKIVO, Inc. (nakivo.com) is a privately-held company founded in 2012. NAKIVO develops a fast, reliable, and affordable data protection solution for VMware, Hyper-V, and cloud environments. Over 10,000 companies are using NAKIVO Backup & Replication to protect and recover their data more efficiently and cost-effectively, while over 140 hosting, managed, and cloud services providers are using NAKIVO’s software to deliver VM BaaS and DRaaS to their customers. NAKIVO has a global presence with over 1,700 channel partners in 117 countries worldwide.
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yana.petrenko[.]nakivo.com 
