Nakivo is new company, based in Silicon Valley, California. Nakivo has entered the already crowdy VMware vSphere backup eco-system at the end of October 2012. The company came up from stealth mode since few months, but has already achieved VMware Ready status and has it’s product listed at VMware Exchange. Nakivo is also VMware Technology alliance partner – Elite.

Their backup product called Nakivo Backup and Replication for VMware can be used on Standalone (licensed) ESX(i) hosts – 4.1, 5.0, 5.1 , but also combined with VMware vCenter when a virtual infrastructure is managed from single central location.

The lowest based licensing at VMware is the vSphere Essentials version, and this package lucks backup product. So it’s a good opportunity for Nakivo to provide low priced product packed with enterprise class features. In those small environments, Nakivo can be used not only for backing up VMs, but also for their replication. But apparently the product can scale up, supporting environments with 1000 VMs, by using backup proxies (

Changed Blocks Tracking – Nakivo leverages changed block tracking (CBT), introduced in VMware vSphere 4.0, which enables to backup only blocks that are different since the last backup. CDP is leveraged also for the WAN replication.

Deduplication and compression – Backups are automatically deduplicated and compressed. To store the backups, Nakivo can use local DAS storage, NAS, iSCSI or other with also direct SAN support for fast transfer speeds.

Cloud Based Backups – Nakivo can backup VMs directly to Dropbox or Amazon EC2, where the costs for this offsite solutions starts from 10 cents per gigabyte per month. (Amazon) or Dropbox pricing … roughly … 1TB under $100 per month.

Replication Capabilities – Concerning replication, the product supports seeding of the first backups, so the full VMs backup don’t have to travel over the WAN to be replicated, but a USB drive can be used to physically transport the backups to the remote site for seeding, before the first replica takes place. The same way as Veeam or PHD Virtual does.

Easy Install and management – Nakivo installation takes 2 clicks and 60 sec. Together with easy configuration, you can be up and running your first backups in less than 10 min. Nakivo Backup and Replication 1.0 provides Web based interface to manage the product. Apache Tomcat is used as web server.

Near CDP - Nakivo has also near CDP (continuous data protection), with 5 min as a minimum for an RPO. There are up to 99 recent recovery points which enables fast recovery of VMs.  Individual files within the VM can be recovered from within the last 30 days.

The product leverages Microsoft VSS to backup database based systems like Exchange or SQL, but also Oracle DBs. It provides easy management, requiring no specific IT skills for operating the backups.

Nakivo can be deployed on Windows 7, 8, Windows Server 2008R2 Standard , Server 2012 Standard or on Ubuntu Linux Server.

International support:

NAKIVO Backup & Replication comes in English, French, German and Spanish languages.

The specs, features and overall, the product looks promising for very small shops which can benefit from lowest price for product of this kind on the market today. Read about details on the new Free versio, Backup to Amazon Cloud, and more on separate page –>