Case study #3 - XOA at Optanex

Optanex^[1] is part of our Xen Orchestra partner program since 2016, located in Malta. They are our most performant partner in Europe. This case study is about the way Optanex is using Xen Orchestra in their infrastructure as well as the way they are promoting our solution to their own customers as a partner.

Can you tell us a bit more about your company? What is your business?

We are a small company focused on:

• web applications (ecommerce, web development)
• Web marketing and SEO
• IT services and security: online backup (Barracuda), D&R (Xen-Orchestra), vulnerability Assessment.

Why did you become a Xen Orchestra partner in the first place? Are you using Xen Orchestra in your own infrastructure? Does it help you to sell the appliance?

We do a lot of research and testing; Xen-Orchestra came out after a lot of testing on XenServer VM backup problems.
It solved brilliantly the need of web access to XenServer and a fast disaster recovery of Windows and linux VMs.
With differential backup on an NFS NAS we have reached an excellent backup speed.

What are the features in XO your customers are the most interested in? Can you give a classic selling scenario?

Customers that love XenServer and want to get rid of agent-based backups (Acronis and others) because they have 10 to 100 VMs running in their environment.
The other two big drivers that we frequently find are:

• fast backup: night is becoming too short if you have plenty of VMs to save; they now need backup window shorter than 3-4 hours. XOA addresses this.
• long backup history needed: companies need many weeks or months of backup sets, not just days.
  Less frequently, but increasingly, some customers ask for a second, independent host/storage on which they replicate all or some key VMs; XOA can replicate them easily.