NAKIVO Saves Time and Money for a Cement Producer
Business Challenge
Cementownia Warta is a Polish cement producer. The plant was built between 1960 and 1963 and modernized several times since that. Currently, the plant produces up to two million tons of cement each year. Cementownia Warta not only produces cement but also offers services like transportation, consultation, and laboratory testing. Thanks to an organized distribution network, the compaa)ny’s products are available throughout Poland.
Cementownia Warta has one site, 9 physical servers, and 20 virtual machines. Virtual machines work as workstations under the control of the SCADA system. All data stored in the virtual machines is critical for carrying out cement production processes and maintaining indicators that affect the quality of the final product. Maintaining these parameters is important for satisfying customers’ needs. Moreover, data must be available for determining warranty rights.
Previously, the plant’s data was stored on an additional disk array and synchronized manually. Such a storage approach was old-fashioned and troublesome, especially in case of recovery. The plant experienced issues that related to long backup and recovery times. Managing the backup process also required too much time and attention. After virtualizing a part of the plant’s infrastructure, the company realized that they need to consider speeding up and facilitating the plant’s operations. A backup solution designed specifically for virtualized environments was being considered too. This solution had to protect both virtual and physical environments while being easy-to-use for the IT team.
Solution
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides robust data protection for virtual, physical, cloud, and SaaS environments. The solution offers a comprehensive approach to data protection, ensuring that all critical data and applications are safe. The product offers backup, replication, backup to the cloud, backup to tape, backup copy, granular recovery, instant verification, global data deduplication, and disaster recovery orchestration.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers multiple installation options .You can install NAKIVO Backup & Replication on Windows/Linux, deploy as a pre-configured virtual appliance, or install on a NAS device. The plant installed NAKIVO Backup & Replication on a QNAP NAS. “Mastering NAKIVO Backup & Replication is simple and intuitive. The web interface is clear and logically consistent. After a short time, you can confidently master the web interface without getting lost,” says Grzegorz Czuba, Deputy Chief Power Engineer at Cementownia Warta. “With installation on a QNAP NAS, we basically forgot about managing backups, as everything is done automatically. Moreover, in case of issues with virtual machines, we can quickly and conveniently recover VMs to their correct state.”
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides the necessary technical support. You can contact technical engineers right from the product’s web interface. Moreover, NAKIVO offers free training and deployment sessions to customers to get acquainted with the product. “The trainer who helped us with the installation and configuration was reliable and competent, offering all needed explanations and answers to our doubts, concerns, and strictly technical questions. Support and training significantly accelerated the process of implementing NAKIVO Backup & Replication,” says Grzegorz.
“The solution neither interferes with our work nor consumes considerable resources,” says Grzegorz. NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides application-aware, image-based, and incremental backup of virtual machines. “An initial full backup took a considerable amount of time, while incremental backups take approximately three hours to complete. Virtual machines are backed up once a week, while physical servers are backed up twice a week. Network acceleration functionality helps us increase the data transfer speed due to the structure of our data. The speed boost was meaningful enough so that we continue to use this functionality,” says Grzegorz.
Results
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides Cementownia Warta with simplicity, ease-of-use, as well as virtual and physical backups. For the plant, being able to back up a mixed environment without the need to install permanent agents is a big advantage. With virtual backup, the plant can do application-aware, image-based, and incremental backups. With network acceleration, the plant increases the data transfer speed. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication protects our mixed environment with ease and reliability. The software is easy-to-use. We could even ran the installation and configuration ourselves if we wanted to. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you just need to check every few days that everything is functioning properly, and the process literally takes a few minutes. Ultimately, we saved money, time and achieved reliability,” says Grzegorz.
About Cementownia Warta
Cementownia Warta is a cement producer in Poland. The cement plant is located in Trębaczewo near Działoszyn in the Łódź Province on the edge of the Kraków. The plant’s main processes are the production of Portland cement clinker, cement production, and comprehensive customer service in cement sale, transportation, technological consultation, advertising, testing, and measurement. The company aims to continuously improve the quality of manufactured products and services, as well as strengthen the brand on the market. For more information, visit www.wartasa.com.pl.