NAKIVO and Synology Help Improve VM Recovery Time by 12X for One World Direct

One World Direct, an order fulfillment company headquartered in South Dakota, USA, is using NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed on a Synology NAS to back up Hyper-V VMs 50% faster and recover them 12X faster on average.

owd.com

Business Challenge

Headquartered in Mobridge, South Dakota, One World Direct is a US company that provides order fulfillment, call center, and e-commerce services since 1994. The company is trusted by Sony, BMW, Facebook, and other companies big and small. One World Direct manages online marketplaces, vendor compliance, EDI, as well as builds web stores and integrates to various customer systems.

One World Direct has three distribution centers and one call center in the US, while their IT infrastructure consists of four physical servers and approximately 30 Hyper-V VMs. Hyper-V VMs store mainly the company’s internal data, including a warehouse management system, financial information, and order processing information. Several applications are internally built and the company also uses Rackspace for email hosting. A call center should be available 24/7 to provide customer service, as well as overnight crews should have access to data to fulfill work orders. In case the management system becomes unavailable, all four facilities will be taken offline and that would impact order fulfillment, deliveries, and customer satisfaction.

“Our previous data protection process was a headache, since we were pretty much doing manual backups, going in and creating snapshots of all the VMs was extremely time consuming. Basically, our goal was to find a stable and robust Hyper-V backup solution. Not only did we need a product that would offer fast and easy VM backup, but we also wanted automatic backup jobs, as well as alerts of backup jobs completion. In addition, we needed ease of access and management, in order to utilize our resources more efficiently in other areas of business,” says Steven Schmidt, System Administrator at One World Direct.

Solution

The IT team at One World Direct has come across NAKIVO by performing a Google search and has implemented NAKIVO Backup & Replication with success. When running the trial, Steven was impressed with the product’s ease of use, performance, and flexibility and is why it only took a month to get the management approval for purchasing the software.

“We were replacing our previous NAS server, so as we were ordering a new one, I thought that NAKIVO Backup & Replication would fit perfectly with the new NAS box, since the software is also available to download as a native Synology package.

“We installed NAKIVO Backup & Replication on our new Synology DS1817+, in order to take advantage of combining the Synology hardware and NAKIVO software. NAKIVO Backup & Replication uses the NAS processing power to create VM backups and leverages the available space on the NAS to store Hyper-V backups. And those VM backups are automatically deduplicated and compressed to save storage space. So, basically, hardware, software, storage, and deduplication are all combined together and create a VM backup appliance and this gives us a great advantage,” says Steven. “The ease of use that we get from NAKIVO Backup & Replication and the stability of Synology NAS server is definitely a winning combination. I also like how easy it is to operate the software within the web interface, since you cannot get lost in the settings.”

Before the IT team at One Word Direct installed NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the Hyper-V backup process took multiple nights, while with NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the backup performance has improved drastically. “With our previous backup process, we were unable to back up everything during one night, so we often had to split it up between multiple days throughout the week. Ever since we installed NAKIVO Backup & Replication on Synology NAS, the difference in speed made a big difference. We start backup jobs at midnight and we run them throughout the night, so that they finish at approximately 6am. Overall, we went from multiple nights (at least 12 hours) to 6 hours and that is great,” says Steven.

In addition to a faster and more reliable Hyper-V backup process, One World Direct also improved Hyper-V VM recovery. “During the trial period, one of our Hyper-V VMs failed and with NAKIVO Backup & Replication we successfully recovered that Hyper-V VM and put it on the same host in under 5 minutes. Typically, it would have taken us at least an hour, and now within 5 minutes that VM was restored to the same state as it was before, so it is fantastic,” says Steven.

Results

NAKIVO Backup & Replication installed on a Synology NAS enables One World Direct to improve Hyper-V VM backup speed by at least 50%, in comparison to the company’s previous approach to data protection. With Hyper-V full VM recovery, One World Direct also improved VM recovery speed by 12X, so that the IT team can now restore VMs in minutes rather than hours. Furthermore, NAKIVO Backup & Replication gives the company full confidence in data security and 24/7 availability.

“In the past, when servers went down and more than 200 people had nothing to do because of server’s failure it was devastating. In NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we found a stable VM backup solution that lets us back up VMs faster and recover VMs in minutes and that is extremely helpful in order to keep our business operations available at all times. I personally receive notifications regularly about the state of backup jobs and I do not spend much time on managing backup jobs anymore, while I was spending a big chunk of my time on backup administration before. NAKIVO Backup & Replication helped the company achieve availability of business systems, while I also saved time on backup maintenance,” says Steven.

About One World Direct

One World Distribution opened its doors for business in 1994. With the Web’s rapid emergence and the creation of direct-to-consumer e-tailing, the word “Distribution” became less appropriate. To better reflect its focus on direct-to-consumer fulfillment, call center, and e-commerce services to other companies, One World dropped “Distribution” from its name and became One World Direct. World’s client base ranges from Fortune 500 conglomerates to celebrities and e-tailers of all sizes. Many clients represent multiple market sectors, including vitamins and nutraceuticals, fitness, publishing, electronics, apparel, health and beauty, and many more. In addition to order fulfillment, call center and e-commerce integration, One World provides returns processing, warehousing, inventory management and credit card processing. For more information, please visit owd.com.