Nakivo is a relatively new company in the backup solution segment for VMware environments, having been founded in 2012. I’ll be honest I had not heard of them until recently but once I looked into them I was impressed with their solutions and rapid growth rate. Their core product, Nakivo Backup & Replication provides companies with a robust data protection solution for their VMware environment and features an impressive list of enterprise grade features at an affordable price point.

Nakivo Backup & Replication can be deployed in a variety of methods including as a virtual appliance, on Windows or Linux, on AWS and something I found pretty slick, directly on a Synology or Western Digital NAS device. I have a Synology NAS unit as part of my home lab and they are great units that are available from small 2 drive models all the way up to 12 drive models that can be rack mounted or put on a shelf. To install it inside your Synology NAS unit you simply download the NAS package from Nakivo and then go to the Package Center in the Synology management console and install it. Once installed you can then access it from within your Synology management console.

As far as features go, Nakivo Backup & Replication has plenty of them including the following:

• Instant File/Object recovery
• Data deduplication and compression
• Multi-thread processing and network acceleration
• Flash VM boot (instant restore from repository)
• Screenshot backup verification (pretty cool!)
• Application aware backups (i.e. MS SQL, Exchange, Active Directory)
• Full Synthetic Data Storage (smaller & faster backups)
• Certified VMware Ready and VMware vCloud support

Plus a lot more, for the full list you can check out the Nakivo Backup & Replication product page or datasheet. That all sounds great, but what’s it going to cost you? I was impressed by their affordable pricing as well, their entry point is $199/socket for Pro Essentials and $299 for Enterprise Essentials which gets you more features. Their Essentials licensing is similar to VMware’s Essentials offering as they are sized for smaller SMB environments and have a limit of 6 licenses per environment. Their Pro ($399/socket) and Enterprise ($599/socket) licenses offer the same feature sets as their Essentials counterparts but with unlimited scalability. Nakivo even makes it attractive to move from a competitor’s platform with special discounted $149/socket trade-in price. You can view the full pricing, licensing and feature information here.

Nakivo lets you try before you buy with a trial edition and they also offer a free edition as well. Their free edition is fully functional but has a limit of protecting only 2 VMs. So if you want to ensure that your VMware environment is well-protected from data corruption, malware, user mistakes, hardware failures or disasters give Nakivo a look and get peace of mind for an affordable price.

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