NAKIVO Saves Large Manufacturer 30% on Backup Costs and Boosts Recovery Time by 50%

Weldall Manufacturing, Inc., a large weldment and large fabrication manufacturer from Waukesha, WI, saves 30% on backup costs and boosts their VM recovery time by 50% with NAKIVO Backup & Replication.

www.weldallmfg.com

Business Challenge

Weldall Manufacturing, Inc., located near Milwaukee, WI, is a full service large weldment and large fabrication manufacturer of the highest integrity and quality. The company specializes in medium-to-large weldments, crafted by extremely skilled American Welding Society (AWS) certified welders. Weldall Manufacturing, Inc. also possess a skilled workforce and the capital-intensive equipment required to complete intricate Precision CNC Machining and other secondary operations required by some of their clients' various custom heavy duty equipment fabrication projects. Their large weldment and large fabrication facility has been Certified by UL DQS Inc. to ISO 9001: 2008 Standards.

Weldall’s IT infrastructure consists of three sites, all located in Wisconsin. Their datacenter is comprised of six physical servers and 60 VMs, running on VMware ESXi. On three of the hosts, Weldall runs VDI desktops through VMware Horizon View. On the other three hosts run ERP, file and print services, multiple Microsoft SQL database servers, domain controllers, application servers, and other miscellaneous servers. A reliable VM backup solution is important for Weldall’s disaster recovery and data protection plans. File recovery is needed to perform weekly restores, while VM replication should be available if the company ever needs to failover from one site to another in case of disaster. Data is critical for Weldall’s business, and if access to their servers or data were to be interrupted, daily operations would also be highly disrupted.

Previously, Weldall protected their critical data with another VM backup software. The company experienced failed jobs, long backup time, and long file recovery time, where a whole hour was at times needed to restore a specific file. “We struggled with a few incompatibilities during upgrades to VMware ESXi that caused backup jobs to fail. Our backup times were relatively slow for local storage. File recovery was also too slow. The web interface was not intuitive at all and navigation was more complicated than it should be,” says Greg Schlut, IT Manager at Weldall Manufacturing, Inc.

Solution

When Weldall’s needed to add additional storage space for their growing datacenter, a quest for a new VM backup solution was also initiated. Their main criteria were that the new software had to be fast, highly scalable, and support VM backup, VM replication, and file recovery. Weldall decided to switch to NAKIVO Backup & Replication after testing three solutions for over a month. NAKIVO Backup & Replication has the most intuitive web-interface, is fast and easy to setup, and provides all the required functionality for Weldall.

“Installing and configuring NAKIVO Backup & Replication is extremely easy. I could not believe how easy it was to get my first VM backed up. I installed NAKIVO Backup & Replication on a Centos VM and backed up to a FreeNAS SAN in about one hour. The web interface is very intuitive to use and very fast—it is by far the best I have seen and used from a VM backup solution. I also like how easy it is to install transporters onto other machines for either VM backup, backup copy, or VM replication. The dashboard for each VM backup job is also well laid out and easy to see at a glance,” says Greg.

While switching to NAKIVO Backup & Replication, Weldall’s IT team were able to save time on backup administration and improve the speed of their VM backups. “Our whole infrastructure (6TB of data) takes approximately four hours to be fully backed up on a daily basis. With the previous backup solution, this process took us about 12 hours. So, already NAKIVO Backup & Replication is way faster. Moreover, I was able to save time on backup administration. I am now able to see all of my backup schedule with the calendar view and can easily set up my recovery points,” says Greg.

Weldall also takes advantage of NAKIVO Backup & Replication’s instant file recovery, VM replication, and Active Directory integration functionality. “Since NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides us with VM replication functionality, we now have a disaster recovery solution that is easy to set up and can be tested within a day. Instant file recovery times are way faster than with the previous software—at least 50% faster. Lastly, Active Directory integration is nice to have, and I can easily add a new user to a group and give them access to NAKIVO Backup & Replication with their own credentials,” says Greg.

Results

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides Weldall Manufacturing, Inc. with improved VM backup performance, faster file recovery, VM replication, and ease of access and management with an intuitive web-interface. “Very little training is required for new users to manage NAKIVO Backup & Replication. The intuitive web-interface is great. The product’s dashboard has way more functionality than our previous product and I am now able to see almost everything I need in one screen. The online chat option with support is great and it only took a minute to get a response from an engineer to begin helping me. Finally, since we switched to NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we were able to save 30% on our backup costs,” explains Greg.

About Weldall Manufacturing, Inc.

Weldall Manufacturing, Inc., located near Milwaukee, WI, is a full service large weldment and large fabrication manufacturer of the highest integrity and quality. The company excels at both robotic and manual large weldment and large fabrication welding. In addition, their skilled team members also handle the processing of parts and finished component assembly per customer specification. Their large weldment and large fabrication facility has been Certified by UL DQS Inc. to ISO 9001: 2008 Standards. For more information, please visit www.weldallmfg.com.