Case Study: ESU 5 achieves 50% VM backup cost reduction with NAKIVO Backup & Replication

NAKIVO Reduces VM Backup Costs by 50% within Several Nebraska Schools

Educational Service Unit 5 (ESU 5), a cooperative agency supporting schools in Gage, Jefferson, and Thayer counties, manages a growing virtual environment of 26 VMware ESXi hosts and over 100 VMs for 10 school districts—running critical services like Active Directory, DNS/DHCP, and PowerSchool. Backups were performed manually at each district, which was tedious, unreliable, and slow to recover, so ESU 5 needed an automated, reliable, and cost‑effective offsite backup solution.

ESU 5 deployed NAKIVO Backup & Replication, whose intuitive web interface, automated jobs, container-level protection, instant file/application-object recovery from compressed/deduplicated backups, and multi‑tenancy for centralized management with district self‑service met their needs. The result: at least a 50% reduction in VM backup costs, fewer hours spent on manual backups, faster recoveries, and greater confidence that district data is protected.

ESU 5

Ryan McDowell

Technology Coordinator