Canadian Malartic Mine Chooses Nakivo

Nakivo, Inc. announced that the Canadian Malartic mine has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

The Canadian Malartic mine is one of Canada’s largest open-pit gold mines. The mine was developed within just six years after the first exploration drill holes were made in 2005. The mine’s first gold pour occurred in April 2011 and commercial production began in May 2011.

The Canadian Malartic mine’s IT infrastructure is divided into two separate sites: one with seven ESXi hosts and the other site with four ESXi hosts. Both sites hold nearly 40 VMware VMs that store an industrial software for their plant screen viewing, a PI system for viewing data, one file server, and regular Windows servers. IT is critical for the daily operations and production processes at mine, therefore, all of their critical data must be protected on the regular basis. As the mine is fully operational 24/7, the data protection solution should provide 24/7 data availability. Any downtime could cost thousands of dollars per hour for the company.

The Canadian Malartic mine made use of another data protection solution in the past.

“The previous product was more or less okay; however, its usability and functionality were not the best. For example, the solution did not offer us the possibility to recover individual files. For the new product, we wanted more functionality, as well as ease-of-use. Consequently, I approached our IT administrator from the corporate office, and he advised me to consider Nakivo Backup & Replication because he was impressed with the software from a previous encounter with it. He told me that Nakivo Backup & Replication was the best software that he had tried; inspired by his review, I decided to evaluate Nakivo Backup & Replication myself,” says Serge Offroy, automation technician, Canadian Malartic mine.

Backup & Replication is a fast, reliable, and affordable data protection solution for VM backup, recovery, and replication of various VMware environments. The product’s web user interface is designed to reduce management complexity and simplify usability. The software also provides flexible deployment options, including installation on Windows, which was the option selected by the Canadian Malartic mine.

“I had several phone and email conversations with support engineers because they helped me to ensure that our whole installation project was done correctly, with minimal effort from my side. Installation on Windows was a perfect choice for us, as no extra resources were needed. Overall, Nakivo’s support team helped me to understand the product better, as well as guided me through the installation steps,” reports Offroy.

Currently, the Canadian Malartic mine’s network is not necessarily optimized for the daily VM backups. The data that is on the network is critical to the company, therefore VM backups are only done during the plant’s shut down time. Offroy explained that the company is working on a project to install a separate network in order to be able to do VM backups on a daily basis.

“The initial full VM backup took two days, as we had to backup literally all of our data. For me, the speed was pretty fast, if to compared to our previous product. As soon as we optimize our network, I anticipate that the forever-incremental backups should be much faster, but for the time being, I am fully satisfied,” he said.

Data deduplication and compression also helped the Canadian Malartic mine to save 50% of storage space, and now, the IT team can use that space to store more VM backups.

With instant VM recovery, Serge can boot VMs from compressed and deduplicated VM backups, and thus can recover near-instantly.

“Full VM recovery is the main feature that we needed to have in order to ensure near-instant VM recovery in case of a disaster. For testing purposes, I tried to recover a couple of VMs quickly, which I was able to do without any training due to the user-friendly software. Fast VM recovery is critical because we do not want to risk the loss of our critical data during any incident that may occur,” explains Offroy.

With instant file recovery, Offroy can also search and recover individual files from compressed and deduplicated VM backups.

“We did not have this functionality before and now this is a cool feature to have. At least once a month, somebody could lose or delete a file accidentally, they then come to us for help; with instant file recovery we can recover that file for them easily. This can be done in just couple of seconds,” he added.

Nakivo provides the mine with full VM backup, instant VM recovery, and instant file recovery and allowing the IT team to recover entire VMs in minutes, while with instant file recovery, individual files can be recovered in seconds. Additionally, data deduplication and compression functionality saved 50% of the company’s storage space. And as a result of the intuitive web user interface, backup management time is at its minimum, saving Offroy a couple of hours per week.

“In Nakivo Backup & Replication, we found a solid and easy-to-use data protection solution that truly protects our critical VMs. With the previous solution, we did not have instant file recovery, while the usability was also not the best. Now, we have reduced management complexity thanks to the web interface. Plus, we have three main features: full VM backup, instant VM recovery, and instant file recovery,” he concluded.