Vinchin speeds up XenServer backup and restore 90% for French public museum Musée des Confluences

I have been searching for an agentless backup solution for XenServer for years until I find out Vinchin Backup & Recovery. This agentless solution cracks every hard nut for our problems. Backup easiness, DR capabilities, and even V2V migration, the solution really turns out to be exactly what I had been searching for years!

Emmanuel POLET, IT Manager

Musée des Confluences

Business Challenge

Created in July 2014 by Métropole de Lyon, the City of Lyon, and the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (ENS), Musée des Confluences is a French public establishment for industrial and commercial cultural cooperation (EPCC-IC) that deals with humanity's origin and future, the diversity of cultures and societies, and the living world. The museum inherited 3.5 million collections with a history spanning 5 centuries.

“We have a XenServer farm with 3 hypervisors hosting roughly 30 VMs. VMs are used for different usages, such as domain controller, printing server, WSUS, supervision systems, part of our network infrastructure (DNS, proxy server), and some application servers (planning management, a management tool for the museum collections, etc.,)” said Emmanuel POLET, the IT Manager of Musée des Confluences.

With 600,000 visitors a year, the museum has the highest attendance in France outside the Paris region. To support data protection for such huge amounts of data from visitors, art craft management, supervision systems, and so on, the museum builds 2 data centers, with XenServer in the main site and XCP-ng in the DR site respectively.

Emmanuel also pointed out, “The solution we were using until I found out about Vinchin was an agent-based solution, with all the problems and complexity implied like it required installation of a proxy machine for backup of Linux servers and the agent for each and every VM installed, and backup and restore processes were very slow.”

Vinchin Solution

“I find out Vinchin Backup & Recovery on the internet (the first page of searching result). And I begin to dig more, knowing that it is no need to install any agent for VMs to be discovered automatically, and no fussy moves for restoring Linux VMs cause all is transparent and smooth for both Linux and Windows machines. Therefore, it’s simple to install out of a light pre-packaged VM. But besides that, the interface is user-friendly and thus easy to handle tasks,” mentioned Emmanuel.

The agent-based backup solution burdens the public institution with a tardy backup process; however, things are completely different with Vinchin Backup & Recovery. Coming with SpeedKit (CBT alternative)-supported forever incremental backup and multithreaded transmission for one task, Musée des Confluences is in a strong position to perform a quicker and simpler backup. Combined with data deduplication and compression that reduces at least 50 % of data to be backed up, the software offers what Emmanuel calls “lightning-fast backup of all types of VMs.” 

Key servers’ backup is meant for recovery as soon as possible in case of a major crash and thus, it is a big part of the DR plan. Since Musée des Confluences is a public organization, there’s no need to go over the importance of its business continuity. Vinchin Backup & Recovery has different recovery options for different situations. The granular recovery retrieves specific folders or files easily to save time and resources; while the instant recovery brings a crashed XenServer VM in 15s from the backup repository or the offsite backup copy Vinchin saved in another location. “Before that, the restore of a “simple” VM of 20G could take up to 3 to 4 hours… Now it’s a matter of minutes!” Emmanuel said.

There is one thing remaining- the synchronous backup of the main and DR site, or in other words, how to enable the disaster recovery of the secondary data center. The Vinchin technological service team provides the museum with one solution: install another backup system on the DR center and transfer the backup copies to it as a standby plan. Or, the museum could use the V2V migration of Vinchin Backup & Recovery to turn one virtualization into another, then send backups to the offsite center.

Result

Vinchin Backup & Recovery delivers fast agentless XenServer backup services for Musée des Confluences helped by SpeedKit, data reduction techniques, and multithreaded transmission. At the same time, disaster recovery for data retrieval is worry-free with the 15s instant recovery of the software that squeezes hours of recovery into seconds. And the backup of 2 centers is a toilless action because of the solution.

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