NAKIVO Helps Agricultural Company Cut Backup Time by 50%
Business Challenge
PT Pertani (Persero) was established in 1959 as an agricultural company that aims to maintain food sovereignty and help Indonesian farmers. PTP Pertani produces, procures and markets agricultural inputs and commodities. The company is also a distributor of various agricultural commodities, such as rice seeds in Indonesia. PT Pertani has a marketing network across Indonesia. This network consists of seven regional offices and 32 branch offices.
PT Pertani’s IT infrastructure consists of one site, ten physical servers and multiple Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere virtual machines. As an agriculture company, PT Pertani has several industry-specific applications, as well as Active Directory servers, a database server, an ERP server and a remote desktop server. A reliable VM backup solution is a must when it comes to mitigating the risk of any kind of disaster.
In the past, the company had been exposed to ransomware. The attack left its IT systems unavailable, and the company required a lot of time to recover. PT Pertani could not access its ERP system, so all the company’s operations were at a standstill until the IT recovered all the critical data manually. After such an unfortunate event, PT Pertani realized that a VM backup solution is a critical component of a disaster recovery strategy.
PT Pertani relied on two backup tools that were made specifically for Windows and Hyper-V. However, both tools had several issues that made the administration process difficult. With the backup tool for Windows, the company ended up with backups that were too large. As a result, backups often failed, and recovery was not always possible. The tool also lacked essential functionality for PT Pertani. It did not support backup to tape, and only backup to disk was available. There was no proper scheduling, thus data protection activities required the IT team’s attention and time. The company really needed a new solution that was reliable and easy to manage. The criteria for a new solution was ease of deployment, no limitations in terms of size of backups, instant VM recovery, verification of backups and affordable pricing.
Solution
NAKIVO Backup & Replication ticked all the boxes for PT Pertani and ensured comprehensive protection for the company’s machines and applications. NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides not only automated VM backup with proper scheduling, but also VM replication, backup copy and backup to tape. In addition, the ease of installation, deployment and management made NAKIVO Backup & Replication the best choice for PT Pertani.
Given that the solution supports multiple platforms, PT Pertani chose to install NAKIVO Backup & Replication on a Synology NAS. “Installing NAKIVO Backup & Replication on a Synology NAS server was a breeze. It took us little time from the time we installed the software to the time we ran our first backup job. We did everything independently and managed the system settings via the web interface,” says Alvia Nur Prasetyo, IT Infrastructure Supervisor at PT Pertani (Persero). “The combination of Synology and NAKIVO Backup & Replication is much faster than our previous backup tool, approximately 50% faster.”
PT Pertani’s backups for the entire infrastructure are scheduled to run once a day. Presently, everything runs automatically, so the IT team only monitors the backups occasionally. Moreover, backup verification and the web interface provide ease of use when it comes to administration and ensure that those backups can be used for successful recoveries. Network acceleration has improved the company’s network performance while backups are running. “An example is that currently 40 GB of data takes less than 30 minutes to back up, with an average speed of 150 Mbps in LAN-only mode,” says Alvia Nur Prasetyo.
By deploying NAKIVO Backup & Replication, PT Pertani has gained several benefits. Firstly, the company is saving time on backup administration, as the IT team no longer needs to constantly monitor the software. Secondly, due to automation and scheduling, the whole backup process has become way faster. “Previously, we needed to spend between two to four hours on one of our biggest VMs, where we had to manually copy the database. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, everything is automated and takes up to just one hour,” says Alvia Nur Prasetyo. Instant VM recovery is another favorite functionality of PT Pertani. “There was an incident, where one of our servers had an issue, so we used instant VM recovery. We were able to recover VMs quickly and avoided significant downtime,” says Alvia Nur Prasetyo.
Results
With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, PT Pertani has achieved automated VM backups and saved significant time not only on backup, but also on backup administration. Currently, backup times are way faster, approximately 50% faster than with the previous backup tools. NAKIVO Backup & Replication also provides fast support, and the support engineers can be reached via a chat box found inside the web interface, making the whole interaction effortless. “We are quite satisfied with NAKIVO Backup & Replication. We received a multitude of features at an affordable price. NAKIVO Backup & Replication helped us overcome the issues we encountered previously. We now have more time to use on other pressing issues inside the company,” says Alvia Nur Prasetyo.
About PT Pertani (Persero)
PT Pertani (Persero) is an agricultural company that was established in 1959. The company specializes in producing, procuring and marketing agricultural inputs and commodities, especially rice fields and rice seeds. The company’s mission is to produce and market high-quality agricultural commodities at competitive prices in order to provide benefits for the company’s shareholders and Indonesian farmers. For more information, visit www.pertani.co.id