One World Direct Selects Nakivo to Protect Hyper-V Environment

One World Direct, Inc. has selected Nakivo Backup & Replication to protect their Hyper-V environment.

Headquartered in Mobridge, SD, 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. It 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. They store mainly internal data, including a warehouse management system, financial information, and order processing information.

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, One World Direct.

The IT team at One World Direct has come across Nakivo by performing a Google search and has implemented Backup & Replication with success.

“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. 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 Schmidt. “The ease of use that we get from Nakivo Backup & Replication and the stability of Synology NAS server is definitely a winning combination.“

Before installing Backup & Replication, the Hyper-V backup process took multiple nights, with Backup & Replication, the backup performance has improved. “With our previous backup process, we were unable to backup 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 6 AM. Overall, we went from multiple nights (at least 12 hours) to 6 hours and that is great,” says Schmidt.

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 Schmidt.

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, itt also improved VM recovery speed by 12X, so that the IT team can now restore VMs in minutes rather than hours. Furthermore, Backup & Replication gives the company 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 backup VMs faster and recover VMs in minutes and that is extremely helpful in order to keep our business operations available at all times,” says Schmidt.