Leading Dutch College Delivers Smart, Cost-Effective Data Protection on Nutanix with HYCU for Nutanix

Challenge

Albeda College is renowned for quality vocational education that turns students into skilled, sought-after professionals. To help achieve this, Albeda’s IT infrastructure—which supports 20,000 students and 2,000 employees—must be as reliable and flawless as their instruction.

According to Robert Roos, Albeda’s IT manager,

“Albeda is committed to delivering business-driven IT services with superior stability and security.”

That’s why, several years ago, Albeda decided to bring its outsourced IT infrastructure in-house and move to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud. “We needed Nutanix is a hyperconverged platform that consolidates storage, server, virtualization and networking resources and is very easy to manage.

When it became clear that the backup product Albeda had been using was too complex to maintain and consumed too many server and storage resources, they began looking for a new solution.

Solution

“Data protection is extremely important for Albeda College. It safeguards our core assets and plays a key role in ensuring business continuity,” Roos said.

After evaluating several products, Albeda chose HYCU for Nutanix. HYCU is the only purpose-built backup and recovery software solution for Nutanix. Not only does it preserve Nutanix simplicity with native integration and a hypervisor-agnostic architecture that includes AHV, you can learn it in less than four minutes, deploy in less than three, recover in two and begin backing up in one.

“HYCU integrates seamlessly with the Nutanix platform. It was simple and fast to implement and very easy to use. HYCU’s attractive licensing and excellent 24x7 support made a great value,” Roos said.

Albeda uses HYCU with its Nutanix environment, which includes 20 nodes and about 116 virtual machines and supports a variety of infrastructure and business applications.

Benefits

Saved Money

With HYCU, Albeda also began directing backups to Microsoft Azure, eliminating the need for onsite hardware for intermediate storage. By using 100 percent less hardware for staging backups. Albeda's IT department significantly lowered its hardware infrastructure costs by 400.000 € to start.

Cut Administrative Overhead

HYCU’s simplicity resulted in reduced administrative overhead from day one. “Because of HYCU’s intuitive user interface, there was no steep learning curve or complex training needed. Sharing knowledge across our IT organization was easy,” Roos explained. “We save a lot of time on an ongoing basis as well. By eliminating storage hardware, we were able to cut the hours spent maintaining our backup environment by 50 percent. This frees our team for other important projects.”

Accelerated Backups

Albeda’s backup windows are much smaller now, as well, as a result of implementing HYCU. Now that HYCU backs up their VMs in real-time in the cloud, Albeda’s backup speed has more than doubled.

Boosted Reliability

Before using HYCU, Albeda’s IT team had to constantly supervise and make adjustments to its backup product to make sure everything was working. That’s no longer needed, according to Roos. “Since introducing HYCU, our backup processes have run flawlessly," he said.

About the customer

Albeda College is an educational institute that serves 20,000 students across 35 sites around Rotterdam, The Netherlands.