Boise Cascade Achieves Instant Disaster Recovery with NAKIVO
Business Challenge
Headquartered in Boise, Idaho, Boise Cascade is a leading manufacturer/distributor of wood products and building materials. Boise Cascade Wood Products Manufacturing provides quality products and services to wholesalers, retail dealers, and builders to meet the construction needs of end users. Boise Cascade Building Materials Distribution provides lumber and building material dealers, home improvement centers, and industrial customers the products and services they need.
The Inland Region of Boise Cascade, with headquarters at La Grande, Oregon, is comprised out of five sites and six VMware ESXi hosts. Approximately 75% of the IT infrastructure is virtualized, while the other 25% consists of older physical servers. VMware VMs store terminal servers, regular desktop, office, and email applications, and servers that help run the mills and provide metrics on their operation. Availability of information is of the highest priority, since networking and electricity are not always reliable in the mountains, so it is vital to have a seamless VM backup and disaster recovery solution. Downtime and data loss can impact such business processes, like manufacturing and distribution.
“Before virtualizing our environment, we just used a standard backup tool that was copying files between servers, but that process was of course old-fashioned and not efficient. When we virtualized our environment approximately two years ago for our region, we wanted to find a VM backup solution with rich, but easy to use set of features. We wanted a central management point, so that multiple people could access and manage backups from a single interface. Also, incremental backup was a must, in order to perform backups faster. Fundamentally, we wanted a feature-rich, simple, and cost effective product,” says Noel Peden, Applications Development Supervisor at Boise Cascade.
Solution
The Inland Region of Boise Cascade decided to choose NAKIVO Backup & Replication to protect their virtual environment. After testing the product during the trial period, Noel felt that NAKIVO Backup & Replication perfectly matched the criteria for a VM backup solution. “The available feature set at a reasonable price point got us immediately excited that is why we started with NAKIVO Backup & Replication and continue to expand our licenses. Installing and configuring the product is simple and straightforward, while the web interface saves additional time in administration. I am glad that NAKIVO continues to improve and deliver new features every quarter, but even with all these new additions, the product continues to be very usable and welcoming,” says Noel.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication protects VMware VMs with image-based backup and forever-incremental backup. With network acceleration enabled, NAKIVO Backup & Replication not only speeds up VM backup, but also reduces network load at the same time. “We schedule backup jobs every day during the evening time, in order to capture the majority of information that has been created during the day. The initial full backup takes longer, but with VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology, all subsequent backups finish much faster. With CBT enabled, it generally takes 15 minutes, which makes me happy. Not only do backup jobs finish fast, the product also saves network bandwidth,” says Noel.
VM replication allows Boise Cascade to create and maintain identical copies of VMware VMs on target ESXi hosts. With VM replication, recovery of critical VMs is fast and with minimal disruption to business operations. “We use VM replication only for our critical VMs because we want to quickly failover and failback, in case of any electricity or network disruptions. Since VM replication creates an exact copy of a source VM, by powering on the VM replica, we can maintain business operations with minimal disruptions. Instant disaster recovery with VM replication is the best feature. Without VM replication, the length of downtime could cause serious delays in our manufacturing and distribution processes,” says Noel.
Results
NAKIVO Backup & Replication enables the Inland Region of Boise Cascade to achieve instant disaster recovery with VM replication. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the region backs up VMware VMs in approximately 15 minutes, due to VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology, as well as saves network bandwidth with network acceleration. Due to a single web interface, the whole region is now able to have access to and monitor VM backups. “NAKIVO’s fast VM backup and VM replication keep our critical VMs running at all times. If VMware VMs would fail, we would only need a couple of minutes to recover, due to VM failover and failback. Before virtualization, we would have to recover and reinstall the server from scratch and everything could take hours, while now, the recovery time is incredibly short. I really appreciate NAKIVO Backup & Replication and its features, since it is reliable, fast, easy to use and is the best priced VM backup solution that I have come across,” says Noel.
About Boise Cascade
Boise Cascade is a public company traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol BCC and headquartered in Boise, Idaho. Boise Cascade has a proven track record of providing quality wood products and a nationwide building materials distribution network for customers, helping them to enhance their own businesses. Boise Cascade manufactures engineered wood products, plywood, lumber, and particleboard and distributes a broad line of building materials, including wood products manufactured by the company's wood products division. The company’s focus is on growth and innovation in order to provide customers the highest quality products and service with a competitive edge. For more information, please visit www.bc.com.