NAKIVO Saves 7 Hours a Week on Backup Administration for Food Production Company

Business Challenge

Harmony Beef Company is a state-of-the-art beef harvest and fabrication facility in northeast Calgary, Alberta. Harmony Beef adapts to the ever-changing requirements and tastes generated by cultural influences and convenience needs, such as packaging and health requirements. Their mission is to supply their customers with safe and wholesome beef products, recognized for its unique taste, trouble-free handling, price stability, profitability, health, and nutrition. From the feeding of the animals to the processing of meat, all levels of production are monitored, thus providing top level quality assurance throughout the process and ensuring a final product of the highest quality.

Harmony Beef’s IT infrastructure is divided into two sites, with all of the server hardware hosted at the main site. Virtual machines at Harmony Beef are primarily used to store files and applications, including copies of HR, accounting, and organization files, as well as production databases that allow the company to run and provide data for shipping and tracking of their products. Since Harmony Beef’s business is data driven, backup and recovery are extremely vital for the company. Information must be available 24/7, including logistics for procurement, loading/unloading times, shipment, and tracking. Moreover, data needs to be protected on account of the legal reasons that govern food quality and safety. Overall, Harmony Beef’s main priority is to ensure data correctness and accuracy at all times.

In the past, the company protected its data via various approaches. Hyper-V replication was used to protect all the servers, and Windows backup was used to back up servers with the task scheduler. The backup time was extremely long, as only full backups could be done of each virtual machine every day. Backup jobs would fail frequently when the network was congested. Sometimes, the IT team could not figure out why and when a particular backup job failed. Most importantly, probably nearly one to two hours every working day were dedicated to starting the backups and troubleshooting all the issues. “We soon realized that our data protection methods had insufficient tools and functionality. We were definitely spending too much time on backup administration and wanted to speed up our backups. We wanted a VM backup solution that offered incremental backup, file level recovery, and easy scheduling of backup jobs. A product that was easy-to-use and compatible with the company’s Synology NAS was a bonus,” says Patrick Cawsey, Systems Administrator at Harmony Beef.

Solution

After the trial period, Harmony Beef decided to start protecting its data and applications with NAKIVO Backup & Replication. NAKIVO Backup & Replication protects physical, virtual, and cloud environment and provides backup, replication, recovery functionality. “We had quotes from three different vendors, however, NAKIVO Backup & Replication was the best choice in terms of mix of functionality and cost. We had plenty of time to test the software and get a hands-on feel. The installation and configuration process was extremely easy, as we installed the software on our Synology NAS. The web interface is easy and even better than an application, as I always have it opened and can switch the tabs easily,” says Patrick.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication paired together with a Synology NAS box provides Harmony Beef with a high-performance VM backup appliance. “Such integration was an absolutely massive advantage since prior to testing the software, we had to mount our NAS as a drive on a backup server and it was just a data dump. Such a method did not allow us to utilize all the Synology functionality. NAKIVO Backup & Replication’s integration with our Synology NAS box was huge because as soon as we started the trial, everything we needed became easily accessible,” says Patrick.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication helps Harmony Beef to schedule and automate their VM backup jobs and receive automatic reports about the jobs status. “Previously, everything was done manually. Now, with backup scheduling, we can schedule our backup jobs at any convenient time for us. Reporting is also extremely useful for us, as we now receive emails and know that our backups have completed successfully. With reporting, we are also alerted when there is an issue, instead of having to figure it out ourselves from the logs. Both reporting and scheduling have been huge time savers for us,” explains Patrick.

In addition, NAKIVO Backup & Replication improved performance and backup capacity for the company. “With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we can easily keep recovery points on a yearly basis, while before we could only keep around 21 days. Backup performance has increased and the backup administration headache has diminished. Managing the backups used to be a significant part of my everyday duties, but with NAKIVO Backup & Replication, I am now able to dedicate just a little time and focus on more pressing items,” says Patrick.

Lastly, with instant granular recovery functionality, Harmony Beef can now recover files and objects near-instantly. “Instant file recovery and instant object recovery have saved us time in providing a quick and easy way in recovering deleted files. I enjoy the intuitiveness of these features, just basically follow the prompts and for files, you can even download them or email them, giving you some options how you would like to recover,” says Patrick.

Results

NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed on a Synology NAS provides Harmony Beef increased performance, better backup capacity, and time savings on backup administration. With scheduling and reporting, the company now has more visibility and automation, and with instant granular recovery, deleted files and objects can be recovered in a minute or so. Previously, one to two hours were spent every day on backup administration, totaling at least seven to fourteen hours a week, while with NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the hours required were reduced to just one a week. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication has saved us thousands of dollars in administrative hours and will continue doing so on a yearly basis. The software works smoothly with our Synology NAS, helps us automate our backups, and saves us time on backup maintenance,” says Patrick.

About Harmony Beef

Harmony Beef is a family owned and operated Canadian company. The plant was established in 2016. Harmony Beef is a state of the art harvest and fabrication facility dedicated to food quality, safety, and customer service. The company is a quality-driven processor of a wide range of boxed beef products and markets its products under its own HB label and private brands for food service, retail, and further processing. The company supports a complete world-class food safety supply chain system, including monitoring by CCIA, CFIA, CBGA, and the accreditation of an accelerated HACCP program. For more information, please visit www.harmonybeef.ca.