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Most organizations today are looking for a backup solution that is able to cover their data wherever it may be housed. This includes data centers that are on-premises or in the cloud. NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a solution that has been aggressively adding features to protect your data, both in on-premises data centers and in the Microsoft 365 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environment.
NAKIVO has also been adding many great integrations with other solutions and technologies into their Backup & Replication product. This has provided many new features and capabilities for backing up your data. Recently, NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.1 was released, touting two major new features for data protection. In this review, we will take a look at the new features in the v10.1 release and see how these add to NAKIVO's backup offering.
New features in NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.1
One of the aspects of NAKIVO that I really like is that they are very aggressive with adding new features. They also have a very healthy beta program where they allow the masses to freely test out new features in beta format before they are included in the GA product release.
As you can see in the official NAKIVO release notes below, NAKIVO has been intent on adding new cloud backup features to the core functionality of the product. Many customers are looking to either utilize cloud storage as part of their backup infrastructure or to back up various cloud environments. In the v10.1 release, NAKIVO is still focusing on strengthening its cloud backup position.
NAKIVO Backup Replication changelog shows a number of new cloud features
NAKIVO Backup & Replication includes the following new features:
- Microsoft 365 OneDrive for Business backup and recovery
- HPE StoreOnce Catalyst integration
Let's take a look at these new features in more detail.
Microsoft 365 OneDrive for Business backup and recovery
For most organizations that want to migrate resources to the Microsoft 365 SaaS environment, there are generally two core cloud services they utilize first:
- Exchange Online email
- OneDrive for Business file storage
As shown in the release notes above, NAKIVO initially delved into the Microsoft 365 backup game in v9.2 with the introduction of Microsoft 365 backup capabilities for Exchange Online. This was a good place to start for introducing Microsoft 365 backup features; however, to round out the core backup features for Microsoft 365, most organizations will want to have the ability to protect not only Exchange Online email, but also OneDrive for Business. This has now been added in v10.1.
The new NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.1 OneDrive for Business backup includes the following capabilities and features:
- Efficient cloud backups—NAKIVO performs incremental backups of OneDrive for Business data, which allows only the changes to be included with each backup iteration.
- Very granular data protection of OneDrive for Business—NAKIVO can back up your OneDrive for Business as often as every one minute for extremely tight RPO and RTO values.
- Quick and Accurate recovery—You can recover OneDrive files and folders to the original location in the cloud or migrate data to a different OneDrive. NAKIVO also allows you to restore specific files and folders from a OneDrive backup without the need to restore unwanted data.
- Searchable backups—Finding where a file existed in a backup can be a difficult process if left to manual search efforts. NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.1 OneDrive for Business backup allows you to perform advanced searches on existing backups to find the data that you need to recover.
- Scalability—NAKIVO's efficient backup manner allows protecting thousands of Microsoft 365 users in a single NAKIVO deployment.
- Support—NAKIVO covers the Microsoft 365 OneDrive backups in their 24/7 support via phone, chat, and email.
- Competitive pricing—NAKIVO touts their solution to be one of the most affordable Microsoft 365 backup solutions on the market. The pricing is a per-user model, as you would expect for cloud environment coverage. The current pricing for a 3-year subscription for NAKIVO Backup & Replication for Microsoft 365 users is $0.75 per user/month.
Backing up and Restoring Microsoft 365
Adding a Microsoft 365 environment to a NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.1 environment requires the same basic workflow as backing up a virtual machine in your on-premises environment. There are a few preparatory steps you must complete to back up a Microsoft 365 environment, including adding a SaaS-compatible datastore and adding appropriate permissions on the Azure Active Directory side. However, once these steps are completed, the normal NAKIVO backup and recovery wizards apply.
Below is a shot of adding the SaaS compatible backup repository for backing up cloud SaaS, including Microsoft 365 environments. This can be directly attached storage or a locally mounted share on an assigned transporter.
Adding a SaaS backup repository compatible with Microsoft 365
After your repository is added and mounted, you can add your Microsoft 365 environment to NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.1.
Adding your Microsoft 365 environment to NAKIVO
Once the account is added, as you can see below, the new v10.1 allows selecting not only the Mailboxes but also OneDrives in the account.
Select the items in your Microsoft 365 environment that you want to back up
After you have successfully backed up your Microsoft 365 environment, including OneDrive, you can restore items found in the backup.
Choose which OneDrive objects you want to recove
Choose which OneDrive objects you want to recover
Both the workflow and the process itself were easily completed, and I had no issues either backing up or restoring data to a OneDrive account with the new NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.1 functionality.
HPE StoreOnce Catalyst integration
The other major new feature is HPE StoreOnce Catalyst Integration. Starting with NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.1, you can create a NAKIVO backup repository on a StoreOnce appliance with HPE StoreOnce Catalyst support. HPE StoreOnce Catalyst provides a disk-based backup solution that touts many great features, including the following:
- HPE StoreOnce deduplication software provides extremely efficient data deduplication that allows high performance scaling and efficient storage of your business-critical data.
- The StoreOnce Catalyst protocol is a proprietary protocol that provides protection from malicious threats in the environment, such as ransomware.
- Network bandwidth is reduced as only unique data is transferred.
- Data deduplication provided by StoreOnce allows for lower physical hardware footprints.
- Better backup copy job performance between HPE StoreOnce storage devices.
The process of adding an HPE StoreOnce Catalyst backup repository is easily accomplished in NAKIVO under Settings > Repositories.
Adding an HPE StoreOnce Catalyst backup repository
Once you have the new HPE StoreOnce Catalyst backup repository added, you can simply target it with your NAKIVO backup jobs. The NAKIVO backup repository will inherit all the underlying benefits of the HPE StoreOnce Catalyst appliance.
Wrapping up and impressions
The NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.1 cloud backup protection for Microsoft 365 environments has, with this release, achieved the core backup features that most organizations will at least want to start with when migrating their data to Microsoft 365 environments. For most organizations migrating data to Microsoft 365, backing up cloud email and file storage are the core requirements. I am sure that NAKIVO is no doubt looking at backing up other Microsoft 365 services such as SharePoint Online in future releases, as this is one of the other major services that organizations may utilize in the Microsoft 365 cloud SaaS environment.
I found the process to backup and restore OneDrive files extremely easy and on par with the normal NAKIVO workflows that most have grown accustomed to for both backing up and recovering files. The process was straightforward and intuitive.
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A standout for NAKIVO is the pricing. NAKIVO's price of $0.75 per user is extremely competitive and would certainly allow many organizations to save a tremendous amount in licensing costs for their data protection solution in Microsoft 365 in comparison to other vendors.
Yes! At 1/2 the price of most others, NAKIVO is the case to beat. I am not sure if they cover RedHat 5.11 physical server backups and Hyper-V CSVs, so those are my next research items for NAKIVO. Thank you for the great post!
Thanks for the direct link to Release notes, which is where I often go to see how active a project is and what the current focus of Development is.
when I search NAKIVO Knowledgebase and release notes for “CSV. or “Cluster Shared Volume”, I find zero hits, so that tells me their Hypver-V support is pretty immature and it is not a good solution for Medium business supporting Hyper-V environments.
I find that most backup solutions have dropped support for older Linux distorts, so I’ll have to get creative. It seems that the following Linux OS are supported at time of post: