There is a big difference between VM Recovery and Instant VM Recovery. All systems can’t afford a leverage of facing down time in crisis. The requirement is such in those cases, that the moment any critical application or system is down, it needs an instant recovery. It is something close to zero down time of system. Taiwan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare is one such example. It is responsible for the administration of public health system, social welfare, affordable and universal health care, hospitals, immunization programs, disease prevention, including supervision and coordination of local health agencies in Taiwan. Keeping such a huge setup always up is a daunting task. It was after a thorough understanding of various solutions that Taiwan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare decided to zero down to the one provided by NAKIVO. The results are tremendously satisfactory for the Ministry achieving Instant VM Recovery with NAKIVO.
Challenge:
It was a very tough business challenge for the Ministry but not for NAKIVO who have various such success stories. Some of them even larger than this. The key purpose of establishing the Social Welfare Organization Administration Commission (SWOAC) at the Ministru of Health and Welfare was to manage matters involving the administrative services of public health. The commission comprises of 26 hospitals, 13 social welfare organization, and around 15,000 health professionals and social workers serving at the Ministry of Health and Welfare. For such a huge network, it required a foolproof mechanism to ensure instant VM recvovery that only NAKIVO could provide.
Commission’s IT infrastructure supports the administrative services required to achieve the mission of health and well-being for all stakeholders. “We started to virtualize our environment in 2011 and up to this date we have over 200 VMware VMs. VMware VMs run hospital applications, such as PKI, HIS, Electronic official documentation, and others,” says Vincent Liu, System Planner at SWOAC. With the downtime at the commission it would lead to delay in appropriate arrangement of administrative services. Keeping that in mind, protection of virtual environments became an utmost priority.
“Previously, we practiced the traditional way to copy data to a USB disk from a VM. The recovery process was taking way too long because we had to re-install a VM and then restore data to that VM. For that reason, we decided to look for a more efficient way to protect and recover our VMware environment because we wanted to avoid downtime,” adds Vincent. In fact, NAKIVO solution not only helped them in avoiding downtime and data loss but also resulted in high availability across the entire enviroment.
Solution:
SWOAC finalized NAKIVO Backup & Replication to ensure data protection in their virtual environment. “We needed a complete solution, not just a product. NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides efficient VM backup and recovery features. In addition, web interface is intuitive and easy to manage. NAKIVO’s technical pre-sales department in Taiwan demonstrated to us how to instantly restore our VMware environment and we were sold on the solution,” says Vincent.
With Instant VM Recovery, the commission is able to recover the full VM from the backup in just a few clicks. “Instant VM Recovery is the most essential feature. We no longer need to manually recreate the VM and then restore data to the VM. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the entire VM is recovered in exactly the same state as it was during the backup. Flash VM Boot recovers VMs in seconds, without waiting for full restore from backup files,” says Vincent.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication was selected based on its fast recovery capabilities. The added advantage it brought was VM backup and global data deduplication. “With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we can perform VM backup on schedule and considerably reduce storage space with global data deduplication. Another advantage is that backup image is not tied to the database, so that we can transfer backup image to other locations. We just need to deploy NAKIVO Backup & Replication appliance to a remote site and the backup image can be restored immediately,” says Vincent.
Results:
NAKIVO Backup & Replication empowers SWOAC with fast VM backup and recovery. With the help of NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the commission is able to save an extensive amount of time on VM recovery because Flash VM Boot enables instant recovery of VMware VMs. In addition, VM backups can be conveniently scheduled and storage space reduction is beneficial. “Everyday we see money and time savings with NAKIVO Backup & Replication. Now, we have achieved highly available data protection in our virtual environment,” says Vincent.
