NAKIVO Enables Manufacturing Company to Recover Core Services at the Flick of a Switch and Get Back Online Within 4 Hours of a Complete Disaster
Business Challenge
The virtual infrastructure at Acorn Fasteners has 20 desktops running regular office apps and clients for ERP/MRP, and five servers running Exchange, SBS 2011, ERP/MRP, Domain Controller, and vCenter Server. "To protect our data, we pushed daily backups to USB disks and stored them offsite in rotation," said Jim Rankin, Strategic Project Manager for PRAIZAR. "In the event of a complete disaster, we would have had to rebuild systems from scratch."
Although Acorn Fasteners required 24/7 availability and zero downtime of their core services (such as their online store), the existing data protection solution was unable to fulfill these requirements. "Speed and cost of recovery from a complete disaster was always a worry," said Jim. "If a fire destroyed our offices and all things in them we would have had to purchase replacement hardware before we could consider restoring our systems to operation efficiency. Based on our estimates, this would have taken a week for our core services to be back on-line."
Solution
After an investigation, Jim decided to try NAKIVO Backup & Replication for replication to their remote data center. With forever-incremental replication, near-continuous job runs, changed block tracking that makes sure only changed data is transferred, compression that reduces the data size, direct SAN support for ultra-fast transfer speeds, and multi-threaded VM processing NAKIVO Backup & Replication exceeded Jim’s expectations. "Replication went very smooth and extremely fast," he said. "What’s more, NAKIVO Backup & Replication does not require its own servers, has low overhead, and is so easy to use that I didn’t have to spend time reading manuals."
Results
"NAKIVO Backup & Replication has helped make the job of disaster recovery from a complete disaster extremely easy. Even in case our infrastructure is completely destroyed by a fire, flood, or anything else, we know that our core services can be back in operation at the flick of a switch," said Jim. "NAKIVO Backup & Replication has helped us reduce our predicted downtime from 1 week to just 4 hours in the event of a complete disaster."
Company Profile
Acorn Fasteners Ltd. was founded in the 1970's. The objectives set by the directors then were to service the needs of local and national original equipment manufacturers with threaded fasteners. Since then, Acorn has become synonymous with many of the industry leaders for supplying them with competitively priced, quality products on time, and with an almost 0% product failure rate.
As the 1980's progressed the company's reputation for quality and personal attention strengthened and was established as a force within the industry. The company is now in a position to expand its activities further in both the domestic and international markets.
PRAIZAR is the Middle East Distributor for NAKIVO, a VMware Technology Alliance Partner and a VM backup to cloud leader. With more than 40 years of extensive technical IT experience in the Middle East, PRAIZAR specializes in delivering effective, affordable and appropriate virtualization and cloud-based IT solutions for SMBs. They are committed to lowering the IT total cost of ownership (TCO) for SMBs and have clients in the UK, USA and Middle East. Their partners includes NAKIVO, VMware, Dell and Microsoft. For more information, visit www.acornfasteners.co.za.