Weldall Manufacturing Chooses Nakivo Backup & Replication

Nakivo Inc. announced that Weldall Manufacturing, Inc., a Waukesha, WI based weldment and fabrication manufacturer, has selected its Backup & Replication to protect their virtual environment.

Weldall Manufacturing is a full service large weldment and large fabrication manufacturer of integrity and quality. It specializes in medium-to-large weldments, crafted by skilled American Welding Society (AWS) certified welders.

It 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 6 physical servers and 60 VMs, running on VMware ESXi. On 3 of the hosts, it runs VDI desktops through VMware Horizon View. On the other three hosts run ERP, file and print services, multiple SQL database servers, domain controllers, application servers, and other miscellaneous servers.

A reliable VM backup solution is important for Weldall’s DR 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 its business, and if access to their servers or data were to be interrupted, daily operations would also be 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, Weldall.

When the customer 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, scalable, and support VM backup, VM replication, and file recovery.

Weldall decided to switch to Nakivo after testing 3 solutions for over a month. The new solution has the most intuitive web-interface, is fast and easy to setup, and provides all its required functionality.

“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 Schlut.

While switching to Nakivo, 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 4 hours to be fully backed up on a daily basis. With the previous backup solution, this process took us about 12 hours. So, already 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 Schlut.

Weldall also takes advantage of Backup & Replication’s instant file recovery, VM replication, and Active Directory integration functionality.

“Since Backup & Replication provides us with VM replication functionality, we now have a DR 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 Backup & Replication with their own credentials,” says Schlut.

Backup & Replication provides Weldall Manufacturing 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 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 Backup & Replication, we were able to save 30% on our backup costs,” explains Schlut.