Vinchin optimizes backup storage space and cuts costs for Multimedia University

In order to adapt to the rapid growth of data brought by today’s changes in information technology, we have virtualized nearly all of our critical data and applications on Sangfor HCI. Therefore, we were using xx backup solution for two years trying to protect these vital Sangfor VMs comprehensively, it worked well but our backup storage was consumed quickly, which prevents backups from being kept long enough, finally, we had to increase the budget to get a new backup repository to meet our demands. Apart from this, the cost of the product itself was also the focus of our debate, so after careful consideration, we moved to Vinchin!

Miza Tu, System and Network Administrator

MMU

Business Challenge

Multimedia University (MMU) is the first-ever full-fledged private university in Malaysia, which has three campuses, located in Melaka, Cyberjaya, and Johor. At the same time, MMU hosts 9 faculties and 8 research institutes. Since 2015, MMU has been placed in the top 151-200 universities worldwide by QS World University Rankings by subject Electrical and Electronics Engineering.

MMU's Sangfor HCI consists of two separate sites located on the Cyberjaya campus and Melaka campus, with a total of 40 virtual machines. Virtual machines store a variety of databases and applications including student files, a large number of papers and journals, and other critical documents. "With our university is constantly developing and growing in size, it's inevitable that the more and more critical data for our staff and students need to be backed up. And we were also satisfied with backup performance with the previous backup solution, while the big problem is that a large number of backup space has been consumed as there are no any methods we can adapt to minimize the data size when performing backup job. The backup performance is reduced as backed up data is as big as the original." Says Miza.

Since MMU is always keeping the notion that money is spent in the right place, budget is always a vital concern. "We were not satisfied with the price that the previous vendor offered us. Not only because it's higher than the average market price, but the quality of features they support has not reached the same level as its price. For example, copies can only be restored to use from offsite storage to the local site, which means any failure or disaster could impact our business continuity. That is why we decided to find an Enterprise type solution with a high level of reliability that could meet our demands." says Miza.

Vinchin Solution

MMU evaluated several VM backup solutions at the same time, and they found most of the backup solutions are a legacy backup method. Only Vinchin Backup & Recovery met all of their requirements, while also offering competitive prices. "We did not struggle at all with the installation and configuration of Vinchin Backup & Recovery. Everything was simple to understand from the User Guide, and it is easy to implement and test. Vinchin Backup & Recovery also eliminated our storage space issues by providing the deduplication and compression features, what's more, they can exclude unnecessary data automatically when performing backup jobs, which reduced our backup storage consumption by 2X for sure, before we could only store backups for about 1 week, while now we can store them for more than 2 weeks. " says Miza.

With Vinchin Backup Copy feature, MMU can not only restore backup copies from offsite to the local site but also restore backup copies at an offsite production environment in case of any disaster. "We are excited to have such an excellent feature to cover our demands for Disaster Recovery, we can copy any backups from Cyberjaya campus datacenter to Melaka campus datacenter whenever necessary to make sure that critical files and applications get the double protection, meanwhile the services can be restarted immediately at the second data center when the primary fails," says Miza.

Result

"Our entire experience with Vinchin Backup & Recovery has been great so far, as we achieved disaster recovery and improved performance overall. Especially thanks to the built-in deduplication and compression, we can save more VM backups in our backup repository without additional investments. In addition, since Vinchin Backup & Recovery has been certified by Sangfor and we have enjoyed world-class after-sales support all the time, Vinchin has won our 100% trust, I'm happy to recommend it to more people!" says Miza.