Virtualization has introduced a multitude of benefits for businesses, including increased productivity, agility, flexibility, and cost efficiency. The technology has made it possible to generate, process, and store increasingly large volumes of data, contributing to the global trend of rapid data growth. However, along with undeniable advantages, virtualization has also brought some data protection challenges – reliable data protection being one of the most important.
NAKIVO, one of the fastest-growing data protection software vendors, recognizes the importance of having effective data protection tools that are designed specifically for virtualized environments. Their flagship product, NAKIVO Backup & Replication, enables multiple businesses across the globe to protect their VMware, Hyper-V, and AWS EC2 environments in a fast and effortless manner.
SourceForge reached out to Bruce Talley, CEO of NAKIVO, to talk about data protection for virtual environments and how NAKIVO Backup & Replication takes care of this task.
Q: Can you share with us a brief background of NAKIVO (history, industry, products, etc.)? When did the company get its start and what issues do you seek to address?
Bruce Talley, CEO of NAKIVO
A: The history of NAKIVO dates back to 2012. Back then, I with a group of likeminded virtualization veterans founded the company headquartered in the US. The first version of NAKIVO Backup & Replication was designed for VMware backup and replication. A short time later we added support for AWS EC2 and Hyper-V, striving to keep pace with evolving technology trends and customer needs.
Today, aside from the US office, NAKIVO has divisions in Europe and Asia. The team has rolled out over 20 versions of the product, complementing functionality with new features in each release. We follow a customer-oriented approach, and from the very beginning, our primary goal has been to solve our customers’ pain points, which include data protection complexity and unreliability as well as high cost and poor performance, etc.
Q: What industries do you serve and who are your current customers?
A: Currently, NAKIVO Backup & Replication has been deployed more than 10,000 times across over 130 countries. We serve companies and organizations that represent multiple industries, ranging from IT and hospitality to government and education. NAKIVO Backup & Replication is trusted by leading brands such as Coca-Cola, FUJIFILM, DHL, Radisson, China Airlines, Honda, Verifone, and many more. All in all, every company that relies on virtualization in their IT infrastructure is our potential customer, and we anticipate new customers to keep joining us.
Q: What does data protection mean to you? And why do you believe hosting, managed, and cloud service providers should leverage your data protection solutions?
A: For us, data protection means the same thing as it does for the rest of the world: knowing that your data is safe and recoverable, no matter the circumstances. At NAKIVO, we see data protection as a means to deliver our clients peace of mind.
NAKIVO also enables hosting, managed, and cloud service providers to deliver data protection services to their clients. We have devised a special program – the NAKIVO Cloud Provider Program or NCPP – to help them drive revenue while acting as intermediaries in achieving our common goal.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication includes multiple cloud-enabling features that simplify the provision of Backup-as-a-Service, Replication-as-a-Service, and Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service. The Linux OS support cuts down deployment costs, Multi-Tenancy enables creating isolated tenants within a single instance of the product, Self-Service simplifies data protection tasks by delegating them to clients, complex architecture allows scaling out to 10,000+ VMs, and web 2.0 UI enables to access the product from anywhere. And most importantly, the product includes simple and affordable per-VM licensing.
Q: When it comes to choosing a data security and recovery tool, what key factors should service providers and/or businesses take into consideration?
A: I firmly believe that the right data protection tool should be agentless, lightweight (e.g., NAKIVO Backup & Replication needs only 2 CPU and 4 GB RAM), and multi-platform. Test the software for performance and reliability, check whether it allows for automation and recoverability testing, make sure the interface is intuitive, and that scalability is not going to be an issue if your infrastructure grows or scales down.
Q: Data and network security is becoming the number one priority for the cloud, managed service, and hosting providers across the world. As a trusted provider of data protection tools, what sort of security strategies and/or encryption technologies do you use to secure and protect virtual machine (VM) environments?
A: NAKIVO Backup & Replication is an integrated data protection tool, providing backup, replication, and disaster recovery, which are traditional data protection functions. To further strengthen data protection and eliminate a single point of failure, the product allows to copy backups to a secondary location and cloud, making the solution 3-2-1 backup rule compliant. The 3-2-1 backup rule dictates that there should be at least three copies of data, with two copies stored locally on different storage media, and one of them sent offsite. Backup data is transferred with AES 256 encryption enabled for enhanced security.
Furthermore, NAKIVO Backup & Replication can be installed on popular models of NAS servers, allowing the creation of versatile VM backup and disaster recovery appliances. By simply separating the appliance with all recovery resources – backup software, hardware, and storage – from the primary environment, businesses can dramatically improve their recovery capabilities and ensure that they are well equipped in the event of a disaster.
Q: Tell us more about NAKIVO as a trusted, global provider of data security and recovery solutions. How does your data protection solution empower cloud, managed service, and hosting providers worldwide?
A: Our NCP Program helps cloud, managed service, and hosting providers worldwide drive more success with customers. Companies become increasingly aware of the importance of efficient data protection and disaster recovery solutions. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, cloud providers can deliver high-end in-demand data protection for virtualized environments at the lowest TCO in the industry, and manage their clients in an easy and effortless manner.
Q: How does NAKIVO enable small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and large-scale enterprises to drive more value from data? What makes NAKIVO stand out from other VM data backup and disaster recovery solutions available in the market?
A: One of the aspects where NAKIVO Backup & Replication shines is affordability. Regardless of how big the environment is, NAKIVO offers multiple editions with flexible per-socket pricing to cover the needs of different organizations, while cutting down their data protection costs.
We have recently complemented NAKIVO Backup & Replication’s set of features with Site Recovery – a cutting-edge disaster recovery (DR) functionality. Now customers can build comprehensive disaster recovery workflows and minimize disaster-related downtime. Site Recovery is, in fact, an independent disaster recovery solution, but we chose to include it into our reliable VM data protection tool.
Q: As an expert in VM data protection and security, what do you think are the characteristics of a reliable data protection solution?
A: The only thing that is more frustrating than experiencing a disruptive event is the inability to recover from it. Whether it be an invalid backup or a failed DR plan, it entails downtime and inability to deliver continuous service. A data protection solution should provide confidence that organizations have effective and valid resources for recovery.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication ensures that organizations do have such resources in place. The software can near-instantly verify the validity of VM backups and replicas with the help of Screenshot Verification, meaning that you have a proof that VMs can be recovered when necessary. At the same time, NAKIVO Backup & Replication allows for testing of recovery scenarios. Site Recovery jobs can be run in test mode to exclude issues and potential failures in the event that actual disaster strikes.
The software additionally allows for self-backup. In case the VM running NAKIVO Backup & Replication is rendered unavailable, you still have the entire configuration, including all jobs, inventory, information about connected transporters, repositories, etc. in your backup.
Q: What are the key features and capabilities of NAKIVO Backup & Replication that make it efficient in securing VMware, Hyper-V, and AWS EC2 environments?
A: All features of NAKIVO Backup & Replication were designed with the sole purpose of making data protection for VMware, Hyper-V, and AWS EC2 efficient, reliable, and easy. The software is a complete solution that offers an extensive feature set which includes backup, replication, disaster recovery, backup-to-cloud, backup copy, backup size reduction, backup verification tools, and multiple recovery options.
With our product in place, users can achieve a 2X boost in backup performance thanks to CBT and RCT technologies, LAN-free data transfer, network acceleration, and advanced bandwidth throttling. Direct installation on NAS devices delivers additional performance-boosting benefits since the software bypasses NFS and CIFS network protocols, writing backups directly to NAS disks.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication makes it possible to lower backup storage space consumption by enabling global deduplication, compressing data, excluding unnecessary data (such as swap files and partitions), as well as truncating log files from backups. By minimizing the VM backup size, the software can help avoid server crashes.
With our brand new Site Recovery feature, you can also automate and orchestrate DR activities and routines across multiple sites from a single pane of glass. From now on, failover, failback, or data center migration can be performed in one click.
All of the above are available in one easy-to-use and intuitive web interface with additional usability features and automation capabilities, such as Calendar Dashboard, Flexible Job Scheduler, Microsoft AD integration, HTTP API, and much more.
Q: How can NAKIVO Backup & Replication ensure the consistency of databases and applications running in virtual machines?
A: To ensure the consistency of databases and applications, NAKIVO Backup & Replication performs backup and replication in an application-aware mode. While backing up or replicating Windows-based VMs, the software relies on the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) service running inside them.
In case the application is not VSS-aware or runs on Linux, the software can run custom pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts to enable application awareness. A pre-freeze script is executed before a snapshot of a VM is taken, and post-thaw script is executed after the snapshot has been taken; allowing for full application and database consistency.
Q: Looking ahead, what trends, technologies, strategies, and/or current market movements will likely shape the future of data storage, management, and protection? And how is NAKIVO meeting these head-on?
A: Hyper-convergence is one of the leading trends that is shaping the landscape of modern data protection solutions, and we are looking to meet these standards too. NAKIVO Backup & Replication supports installation on NAS devices such as ASUSTOR, NETGEAR, QNAP, Synology, and Western Digital, allowing the creation of high-performance VM backup and disaster recovery appliances. We are working towards expanding the list of supported storage vendors in the near future to provide users with even better flexibility.
With support for leading virtualization vendors, NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers an integrated approach to data protection in multi-platform environments. VMware, Hyper-V, and AWS are dominating the market, but there are thousands of companies out there utilizing alternative virtualization solutions, some of which are already on the list of our future considerations.
And of course, while developing new comprehensive functionality and adding support for new solutions, we try not to compromise on simplicity and ease of use. Data protection is a complex task, and our ultimate goal is to reduce complexity for end users to a minimum. NAKIVO provides comprehensive and reliable data protection that goes with simple and understandable software architecture; we hope to follow this principle.
About NAKIVO
NAKIVO is a fast-growing backup company that develops robust, reliable, and affordable data protection solutions for VMware, cloud, and Hyper-V environments. With over 3,000 channel partners in 137 countries, NAKIVO has developed a global presence with leading hosting, managed, and cloud service providers as well as software distributors across the world. NAKIVO specializes in VM backup, replication and recovery software, Hyper-V Backup, VM Backup up to Cloud, AWS EC2 Backup, and more.