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The University of Colorado Denver School of Education and Human Development uses NAKIVO Backup & Replication to recover VMware virtual machines in 10 minutes with Flash VM Boot and reduce storage space by 80% with data deduplication. "VMware virtual machines store our help desk system, which includes a couple of internal student information databases, some legacy systems, web development, and vCenter backup servers. It's important to maintain 24/7 access to data so students and faculty can access information whenever they want. If a disaster strikes, it's imperative to recover our legacy system that allows faculty to keep track of their grades and students. Basically, it's integral for us to back up, replicate, and recover VMware virtual machines," says Matt Mitchell, web developer at SEHD, the University of Colorado Denver. Previously, SEHD's virtual environment was protected by a legacy backup solution. "With the previous backup tool, the support license expired, and at the same time, we upgraded our VMware infrastructure to ESXi 6.5, and all VMware VM backups simply stopped working. The company wasn't very helpful in solving our problem and simply decided it would be easier to find an alternative solution. Additionally, this backup solution didn't have a web interface, general notifications were mediocre, and storage space expanded rapidly. It was very cumbersome to set up backup jobs, and I had to spend time managing backups, as those backup jobs regularly failed," says Matt. Solution: SEHD chose NAKIVO Backup & Replication for two reasons. NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers a comprehensive feature set for protecting virtualized environments and performs better than other backup solutions. "I downloaded and installed NAKIVO Backup & Replication on a backup server. The entire installation process took about five minutes, and the software was up and running in probably half an hour. While I was testing the software, I performed VM backup and replication, then tried Flash VM Boot to test the recoverability of the backups. All functions were fast, and I didn't have to worry about expanding storage space on the ESXi hosts," says Matt. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, VM backup is fast and efficient. "We back up virtual machines every day, and it usually takes a couple of hours to complete the backup jobs. I no longer have to worry about failed VM backups because NAKIVO Backup & Replication is reliable, and I no longer have to waste time on backup management, as I did in the past. In terms of VM replication, I replicate VMs to the same location for testing purposes only. I had a VMware VM that had the wrong version of VMware tools configured, so I replicated that VM and then made the necessary updates to the VMware tools so that the VM replica was identical to the source VM. After that, I was able to fail over from the source VM to the VM replica and fail back,” says Mate. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, Flash VM Boot allows virtual machines to be recovered in minutes. “With the previous backup tool, I couldn’t perform a full VM recovery, but with NAKIVO Backup & Replication, I can recover VMware VMs in 10 minutes. When recovering a VM in our virtual environment, Flash VM Boot helps us maintain data availability 24/7.” Finally, I was able to reduce storage space with data deduplication, which resulted in more efficient disk space utilization and lower storage costs,” says Matt. Results: NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides SEHD with fast, efficient VM backup and reduced backup administration time. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication solved our problem with failed backup jobs, and I no longer waste time with those failed backups,” says Matt. With Flash VM Boot, the school can now instantly recover entire VMware virtual machines. “With previous backup tools, I couldn't recover entire VMs, but with NAKIVO Backup & Replication, I can recover VMware VMs in 10 minutes. With data deduplication, we were able to reduce storage space by 80%,” says Matt.