Vinchin delivers simplified VMware protection for IMBB to optimize administration time

“Vinchin Backup & Recovery improves data security of our critical VMware ESXi hosts via powerful, efficient and easy-to-manage functionalities. With the unified console, fast incremental backup and helpful backup archive it provides, we feel a sense of relief to finally have our VMware fully protected in a simplified way. Now we can focus more on other important IT workloads than before.”

Yiannis Kouklinos, Systems Administrator

The Institute of Molecular Biology & Biotechnology (IMBB)

Business Challenge

The Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology of the Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (IMBB-FORTH) is one of the most prominent life science research institutions in Greece, with an outstanding record of scientific achievements, state of the art infrastructure and a broad range of research, innovation and educational activities. IMBB’s main mission is to pursue cutting-edge research and promote scientific excellence.

As the research programs of IMBB include structural biology, biotechnology, neurosciences, infections & immunity, gene regulation & genomics and several others, such data is no doubt a priceless asset for both the institute and modern biology science development. “We deploy a hybrid IT infrastructure which includes both physical servers and several VMware ESXi hosts to meet the needs of saving data from different projects.” Says Yiannis. 

Keeping VMware data safe all the time was once not so easy for IMBB. “The legacy backup solution we used for VMware backup requires a lot of administration time since we often spent a lot of time configuring and monitoring each backup job,” says Yiannis, “which turned out to be a very demanding task, and we wanted to change this situation to protect the critical data from our research teams in a more convenient way.”

Vinchin Solution

Yiannis found Vinchin by chance when searching for a smart VMware backup solution online, and after testing some essential features of Vinchin Backup & Recovery the team wanted through the full-featured free trial, he instantly made a decision to choose this software for complete VMware protection while helping reduce their administration time.

“One of the things I like about Vinchin Backup & Recovery most is definitely the ease-of-use the software shows. It integrates all the backup and recovery functionalities we want into one console, which makes job setting and monitoring become extremely simple.” Says Yiannis,“In the past, we might spend an hour to boot a VM backup, but with Vinchin, a few minutes of configuration is all it takes.”

Besides the user-friendly management console, Vinchin Backup & Recovery also performs high-speed incremental backups for IMBB to improve the overall VMware backup efficiency. “Daily incremental backups run stably in the data center with the speed boosted by Changed Block Tracking (CBT) feature Vinchin Backup & Recovery provides, hours of time have been saved when compared to the legacy backup solution.”

Vinchin Backup & Recovery also supports IMBB to archive data to cloud for long-term retention. “For a scientific research institution like us, this feature really helps to keep old, valuable data always accessible under specific scenarios. We’ve already saved a lot of not commonly used project information in the ESXi hosts, and once it’s needed, we can find the target data out quickly from the archived version of backup data,” says Yiannis, “which also double secures the data integrity and high availability.”

Result

Vinchin Backup & Recovery brings usability, simplicity and high performance for IMBB to have their mission-critical VMware hosts fully protected. With the unified web-based console, high-speed incremental backup, and archive feature the software provides, all VMware servers in IMBB’s data center have been efficiently secured with at least 50% of the initial administration time being saved.

“Vinchin Backup & Recovery is a powerful solution that helps resolve the biggest management issue that used to give us headaches when deploying legacy backups. We’re happy to build a trusted partnership with Vinchin for easier and faster VMware protection, and now we can be able to focus more on other important IT administration tasks.” Says Yiannis.

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