Nakivo Helps Boise Cascade Wood Products to Achieve DR

Nakivo Inc. announced that Boise Cascade Wood Products, LLC, a manufacturer and distributor of wood products, has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Headquartered in Boise, ID, Boise Cascade is a manufacturer/distributor of wood products and building materials. Its wood products manufacturing provides quality products and services to wholesalers, retail dealers, and builders to meet the construction needs of end users. Boise Cascade Building Materials Distribution, LLC provides lumber and building material dealers, home improvement centers, and industrial customers the products and services they need.

The inland region of Boise Cascade, with HQs at La Grande, OR, is comprised out of 5 sites and 6 VMware ESXi hosts. Approximately 75% of the IT infrastructure is virtualized, while the other 25% consists of older physical servers. VMware VMs store terminal servers, regular desktop, office, and email applications, and servers that help run the mills and provide metrics on their operation. Availability of information is of the highest priority, since networking and electricity are not always reliable in the mountains, so it is vital to have a VM backup and DR solution.

“Before virtualizing our environment, we just used a standard backup tool that was copying files between servers, however, when we virtualized our environment approximately two years ago for our region, we wanted to find a VM backup solution with rich, but easy to use set of features. We wanted a central management point, so that multiple people could access and manage backups from a single interface. Also, incremental backup was a must, in order to perform backups faster,” says Noel Peden, applications development supervisor, Boise Cascade.

The inland region of Boise Cascade decided to choose Backup & Replication to protect their virtual environment. After testing the product during the trial period, Peden felt that is matched the criteria for a VM backup solution.

“The available feature set at a reasonable price point got us immediately excited that is why we started with Nakivo Backup & Replication and continue to expand our licenses. Installing and configuring the product is simple and straightforward, while the web interface saves additional time in administration,” says Peden.

With network acceleration enabled, Backup & Replication speeds up VM backup, and also reduces network load at the same time.

“We schedule backup jobs every day during the evening time, in order to capture the majority of information that has been created during the day. The initial full backup takes longer, but with VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology, all subsequent backups finish much faster. With CBT enabled, it generally takes 15 minutes, which makes me happy. Not only do backup jobs finish fast, the product also saves network bandwidth,” says Peden.

VM replication allows Boise Cascade to create and maintain identical copies of VMware VMs on target ESXi hosts. With VM replication, recovery of critical VMs is fast and with minimal disruption to business operations.

“We use VM replication only for our critical VMs because we want to quickly failover and failback, in case of any electricity or network disruptions. Instant DR with VM replication is the best feature. Without VM replication, the length of downtime could cause serious delays in our manufacturing and distribution processes,” says Peden.

Backup & Replication enables the inland region of Boise Cascade to achieve instant DR with VM replication. The region backups VMware VMs in approximately 15 minutes, due to VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology, as well as saves network bandwidth with network acceleration.

“Nakivo’s fast VM backup and VM replication keep our critical VMs running at all times. If VMware VMs would fail, we would only need a couple of minutes to recover, due to VM failover and failback. Before virtualization, we would have to recover and reinstall the server from scratch and everything could take hours, while now, the recovery time is incredibly short. I really appreciate Nakivo Backup & Replication and its features, since it is reliable, fast, easy to use and is the best priced VM backup solution that I have come across,” says Peden.