Ideal Standard, a leading provider of innovative and design-driven bathroom solutions headquartered in Belgium, shortens backup window by 80% and near-instantly recovers VMs, files, and Active Directory objects with NAKIVO Backup & Replication.

Business Challenge

Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, Ideal Standard is a privately-owned company that employs almost 9,500 people, operates 18 manufacturing sites, and serves over 60 countries across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Using the latest technologies and working with world-class designers, Ideal Standard is focused on developing innovative bathroom solutions across multiple product categories, including bathroom ceramics, taps and fittings, bathing and wellness, as well as furniture and accessories.

Ideal Standard’s IT infrastructure consists of multiple sites that are spread out across Europe and North Africa. At the moment, the company is in the process of completely virtualizing their IT infrastructure and transitioning from their old legacy hardware. With virtualization, the company aims to reduce costs and resources by employing one administrative team to look after and manage the virtual environment. Once the project is completed, Ideal Standard will have approximately 37 ESXi hosts. Currently, VMware VMs store everything from file and print servers to Oracle and SQL databases, financial information, and remote desktop services.

In the past, Ideal Standard used tape backup as a means for data protection for the majority of the sites. The main disadvantage for the organization was the lack of central management, as each location was responsible for their own backups. Furthermore, their backup infrastructure with the tape-centric solution was fairly expensive, especially when tapes broke down and needed to be replaced. Finally, the backup-to-tape approach was not as flexible or as quick as a VM backup system.

“Our users got used to being able to retrieve historical data, so when we decided to virtualize our environment, we needed a VM backup solution that we could manage centrally and still receive the level of backup and recovery that our user base was accustomed to. We wanted to have one central console where we could see an overview of all our backup jobs. We also needed to recover full VMs, files, and objects from backups. In addition, we wanted to have proper backup verification, in order to ensure that we could successfully recover from backups,” says Steven Tomney, ITS Infrastructure Team Leader at Ideal Standard.

Solution

NAKIVO Backup & Replication was discovered by Steven when he was researching the newest virtual backup solutions online. After getting in touch with the sales department, participating in a demo, and then running tests, Ideal Standard purchased NAKIVO Backup & Replication to protect their virtual environment. “For each site that has a server, we deployed NAKIVO Backup & Replication as a pre-configured virtual appliance and the product is backing up data to a storage that runs on QNAP. The installation of the product was easy and with the help from support, we were also able to mount QNAP NFS shares and use them as a backup repository. Once we discovered all the settings and configuration steps from support, from that point forward, we managed to do everything by ourselves. Moreover, with a central web interface, we are able to achieve a 360 view of the entire operations from a single pane of glass,” says Steven.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication performs forever-incremental, image-based backup of Ideal Standard’s VMware VMs. In addition, NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides a Grand-Father-Son (GFS) recovery point retention scheme, which allows Ideal Standard to keep recovery points from any periods they want. “We back up our virtual environment every day and keep recovery points for 2 weeks, 4 weeks, 12 months, and 3 years. The initial full backup, that takes into account all available data for one site took approximately 4 hours to complete. With Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology, subsequent backup jobs finish in up to 20 minutes because only changed data gets transferred to the backup repository. With global data deduplication, we also saved storage space on QNAP by 30%,” says Steven.

“If to compare NAKIVO’s VM backup and our previous approach of backing up to tape, we definitely increased backup performance. The majority of the weekend was required to perform a successful initial full backup to tape and incremental backup during the working week took several hours to complete. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we managed to reduce our backup window by at least 80%,” says Steven.

With NAKIVO’s instant file recovery, Ideal Standard can instantly search and recover files and access Active Directory objects from compressed and deduplicated VMware VM backups. “We like instant file recovery and the ease of mounting virtual drives and then accessing them. We can search for files and folders, select them, and then receive them by email or just download them. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we are also able to see Active Directory containers and objects and recover them in the same way,” says Steven. The screenshot verification feature provides them peace of mind; they can rest assured that backups are consistent, so that full VMs, files, and objects can be recovered from them without issue. “Screenshot verification gives us confidence that when we will perform any kind of recovery, it will not only be successful, but also will help us minimize downtime,” says Steven.

Results

NAKIVO Backup & Replication managed to shorten the backup window by 80% and save storage space on QNAP by 30% for Ideal Standard, in comparison with their previous approach of backing up to tape. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, Ideal Standard can reliably back up their VMware VMs and operate the software from a single pane of glass. Moreover, the company can now near-instantly recover full VMs, files, and Active Directory objects directly from VMware VM backups. “With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we not only managed to save a significant number of hours on operating and managing backups, but also saved thousands on maintenance and moving from a traditional backup method to virtual backup. In the past, we were not able to quickly recover files and objects, but now it is great to have near-instant recovery available at just a couple of clicks. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the level of professional and quick support that we received, while being in the middle of this project, was important for us and that was the reason for pushing our project forward and getting it completed on time,” says Steven.

Try a full featured trial of NAKIVO Backup & Replication here.

About Ideal Standard

For more than 100 years, Ideal Standard has shaped the sanitary industry with leading innovation. Products like the single-lever tap, the rimless toilet or the ultra-flat shower tray were pioneered by Ideal Standard. The company is uniquely positioned with deep-rooted engineering and manufacturing expertise in ceramics, as well as in the taps and fittings product categories, providing high-quality residential, commercial, and healthcare-oriented bathroom solutions. The company’s products are sold under strong international and local brands such as Ideal Standard, Armitage Shanks (UK), Porcher (France), Ceramica Dolomite (Italy), and Vidima (Eastern Europe). Ideal Standard is making its mission to serve professionals with water expertise and investing heavily in new products and ways of working, with a full pipeline of innovation ahead. For more information, please visit www.idealstandard.com.

About NAKIVO

NAKIVO is a US corporation 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 180 hosting, managed, and cloud service providers are using NAKIVO’s software to deliver VM BaaS and DRaaS to their customers. NAKIVO has a global presence with over 2,300 channel partners in 124 countries worldwide. Visit www.nakivo.com to learn more.

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