Vinchin unifies OLVM backups from 3 data centers for German IT services provider

Vinchin Backup & Recovery refreshes our experience on multi-site OLVM protection with its user-friendly features and web UI design. Not only the software makes VM backup a start-ready thing, but also makes the entire backup environment becomes highly scalable. We trust Vinchin for its capability of handling massive data in a flexible way, and the team’s in-time support.

Jürgen Metelski, IT Technician 

MGM Technology Partners GmbH

Business Challenge

Founded in 1994, MGM Technology Partners GmbH has been offering professional IT solutions and consulting services for more than 2 decades for commerce, insurance, and many more public sectors. The company now owns 15+ offices across Germany including Berlin and Munich, constantly delivering highly scalable, secure, and robust enterprise-grade applications to its customers.

With a diversified range of IT projects from software architecture & development, enterprise mobile solutions to web security solutions carried forward at the same time, MGM chose to release parts of heavy management burden by virtualizing their primary data centers on Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager, which cultivates inspiration better with its higher flexibility added on daily IT operations. “We have centrally-managed OLVM clusters in 3 data centers now at different locations.” Says Jürgen, “And when it comes to backup, we want the same kind of centralization to make things really simple.”

The previous OLVM backup solution MGM IT team tested requires users to install a standalone client for task configs, which separates it from backup system monitor center. “That was actually quite inconvenient for us to take overall control, to be fair.” Says Jürgen, “And there’re also multiple other components needed on the source virtual machines if you want the software has its best backup and restore performance. The operations are complex and took us quite a bit of time to do the preparation.” Not before long, the urge of getting rid of this un-user-friendliness pushed the team to find a new one.

Vinchin Solution

MGM IT team applied for a free trial of Vinchin Backup & Recovery right away after Jürgen found out the software’s compatibility with OLVM. “At that time there was only 2 data centers of our company that had OLVM clusters running, so we built up a test environment using existing resources to see how it goes.” Says Jürgen.

In order to minimize the traffic between different data centers, MGM team chose to deploy a backup node in each data center, so that they can centrally manage multi-site VM backups from a single web console. “I was surprised at how easy it was to deploy both the backup server and backup nodes.” Says Jürgen, “And the web-based console has finely integrated both monitoring and task configuration features into one, which is exactly what we wanted most. Most importantly, it does not require any kind of extra tools installed for enhanced performance!” During the testing session, VM backup jobs ran smoothly at both sites, and backup data in each data center was written to the mounted local backup storage efficiently. “We encountered some technical issues later when we were trying to change the internal network interface, and the support team from Vinchin also actively helped us on issue analysis and provide solutions as soon as they could.” Says Jürgen.

For data recoveries, MGM IT team tried all available restore features in Vinchin Backup & Recovery including full VM restore, instant restore, and granular restore to make sure they can always get what they want, and the software didn’t let them down. “No matter it is a most basic or advanced kind of restore, you can always get it started after simple settings. Compared with our previous hard-to-handle solution, you can just imagine how it hits different.” Says Jürgen. “So after a series of in-depth feature testing, we chose to trust Vinchin for the long term with no hesitation.”

Result

MGM now uses Vinchin Backup & Recovery to centrally protect OLVM clusters in 3 data centers by making the most of backup nodes, and manages to take overall control of the backup environment from a single web console where both job configs and status monitor center can be easily accessed. Besides scheduled VM backups stably running after traffic being reasonably distributed, they can also implement different types of data recovery anytime they want. 

customer_story_mgm.pdf