NAKIVO Ensures Continuous Data Protection for a Railcar Leasing Company

Business Challenge

Trinity Chemical Industries (TCIX Rail) has a long history of railcar leasing logistics management services in handling bulk liquids and chemicals. When coupled with their transportation, storage, and distribution network, Trinity Chemical can make the delivery of raw materials, products and/or byproducts one of the most reliable and cost-effective areas of a customer’s business. Trinity Chemical offers a quick response on the different railcar equipment leasing options, and can sublease, re-market or purchase excess railcars.

With just one site in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Trinity Chemical’s IT infrastructure is made up of two physical servers and multiple virtual machines. Virtual machines run a domain controller, a terminal server, an enterprise accounting software, a CRM, an email server and an application server. Since it is in the business of leasing railcars, Trinity Chemical has to comply with strict industry requirements. The company is expected to keep data about its assets for up to 50 years, making backups crucial for the success of the business. VM replication is also key to ensuring uninterrupted work for their staff on their daily duties and not losing transactions and time, if and when systems go down. VM recovery is also important to Trinity Chemical since cryptoware is on the rise. Without a proper data protection solution in place, the impact of data loss on Trinity Chemical can range from lost time to lost wages and inability to conduct operations.

Before switching to NAKIVO Backup & Replication, Trinity Chemical was using another data protection solution. The main disadvantage of the previous solution was difficulty of use. As a result, often the IT team had to consult the technical documentation or contact support for assistance. In addition, the company’s license did not include VM replication. Primarily, Trinity Chemical wanted to decrease costs and add the VM replication functionality. NAKIVO Backup & Replication not only fulfilled both requirements, but also provided a wider range of features and multiple installation options.

Solution

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides protection for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV and Amazon EC2 environments, physical servers, workstations, Oracle Database, and Microsoft 365 data. The product also offers versatile deployment options, with installation on Windows and Linux OS, NAS devices, as VMware/Nutanix AHV VA, or an Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

“NAKIVO Backup & Replication has a great feature set for its price and I feel like the software is easy-to-use and the web interface is very responsive. I also really enjoyed the fact that the software can run directly on my disk array. Currently, NAKIVO Backup & Replication is installed on our QNAP NAS and the whole integration saves resources and space on our hosts because we do not have to install anything on them or run a virtual server,” says Tate Goodman, IT Manager at TCIX Rail.

With VM backup functionality, Trinity Chemical can back up their entire systems in under 4 hours. Global data deduplication saves the company storage space. “The initial full backup took some time, but it was just a one-time process. We do nightly backups of all our systems, even on the weekends, and everything completes successfully during the night,” says Tate. “My favorite features are application-aware backup, where all data in all our applications is backed up consistently, and Changed Block Tracking technology, where only changed data gets copied to the backup repository. In terms of global data deduplication, along with thin provisioning, we were able to empty a fair amount of space on some of our servers. Since we do not need to use all that space, backups are much faster.”

VM replication was not possible for Trinity Chemical with their previous solution, as replication was not included in the license. Now, with NAKIVO Backup & Replication, Trinity Chemical can finally take full advantage of this functionality. “We enjoy VM replication because we can split virtual machines between our two hosts to utilize all the resources of each physical server. With VM replication, we can keep a copy of each virtual machine on a separate server. If one physical host goes down, we can run a virtual machine on our secondary host. This eliminates the complexity of clustering. Also, virtual machines that are not that critical can be just left in a down state, if not needed. Pretty much my favorite feature so far,” says Tate.

“Previously, we were missing a few features and the price was much higher than we could afford. We think that NAKIVO Backup & Replication has a flexible pricing structure that allows us to pay per socket or per VM. Several options are always better than just one,” says Tate. “By switching to NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we can run our network the way we want it and still able to afford to back up all our data. We can now utilize our resources much better and with the addition of VM replication, our data protection strategy is more complete now.”

Results

With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, Trinity Chemical achieved continuous data protection with VM backup and VM replication, saved costs and was able to better utilize all its resources. Before NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the company could not back up its entire network and cross replicate their VMs to different hosts. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, Trinity Chemical saved time on backup administration with simplified management and improved usability.

“For us, VM replication is one of the nicest additions. We run two VM hosts and instead of crowding all the servers on one VM and running regular replication, we split the hosts and make better use of the resources with cross server VM replication. Overall, NAKIVO Backup & Replication will save us over $1,000 per year and if we have an outage that impacts our hosts, the software will save us several hours of recovery time as well,” says Tate.

About TCIX Rail

Trinity Chemical Industries (TCIX Rail) was founded in 1985 with the purpose of identifying and meeting the needs of various bulk liquid shippers utilizing rail equipment. Initially, all energies were focused on providing the right rail transportation equipment at the right time to chemical producers and on being a customer service intermediary. As relationships and partnership alliances grew, producers began to ask for help managing other aspects of their shipping, such as highway transportation, ISO container movements, barge projects, international ocean vessel shipping and leasing of terminal storage space. Soon, it was evident that Trinity Chemical was delivering a valuable service to the chemical and transportation industries. Delivering fully integrated transportation solutions along with the cost-effective customer service became Trinity Chemical’s standard operating procedure. For more information, please visit www.tcixrail.com.