Mining Machinery Manufacturer Famur Customer of Nakivo

Nakivo, Inc. announced that Famur SA has selected Backup & Replication to protect their environment

The Famur Group is the largest manufacturer of mining machinery in Poland and one of the largest in the world. It develops machines and equipment, primarily for the mining industry, but also for the transport, handling, and power industries. Its machines and technologies are known in many mines, ports, and industrial plants across the world. The group currently includes 37 companies and 11 production plants, and employs over 4,000 employees.

Its main datacenter is located at its HQs. It holds Famur’s servers, most of which are virtualized using VMware. At the HQs, Famur has also another location to which it replicates all VMs from the main datacenter. In addition, the company has additional servers in five different locations across Poland and those servers are virtualized on Hyper-V. Famur’s 336 VMs store the majority of the company’s applications (that support the manufacturing process), the company’s own applications, databases, mail servers, monitoring servers, Microsoft Active Directory servers, and other systems. Backup, recovery, and replication are critical because the company cannot afford to lose access to servers and data. Most critical VMs must be replicated to the secondary location, while restores must be performed on a weekly basis.

For a long time, Famur relied on another backup solution to protect their VMware and Hyper-V environments. The company also used one more software dedicated to storage. The previous backup solution was difficult to use and could not be operated by just one person. When issues arose, those could only be solved by specialists from product support. Moreover, high maintenance costs were an issue for Famur, as the company wanted to reduce expenses. As Famur’s infrastructure expanded and data grew, the company decided to switch to a different backup solution that could be licensed per CPU and not based on the size of backups.

After testing several backup solutions offered by different vendors, Famur chose Backup & Replication to protect its VMware and Hyper-V environments. It protects critical data and applications within various environments, including physical, virtual, and cloud. The solution was selected particularly for protecting VMware environment at Famur’s HQs and Hyper-V environments at the company’s branches.

Famur benefited from the versatility of the Nakivo solution. The software can be installed on different OSs and devices, including Windows and Linux and NAS, and as a pre-configured virtual appliance.

“We installed a Director on Windows and installed Transporters on 5 Qnap NAS servers. Thus, from one main console, we can manage tasks in five other locations. What I value most is the possibility of installing a Transporter directly on a Qnap NAS server, as it allows us to quickly run a backup job in a new location. Thanks to this, we were able to save money,” says Waldemar Chrobok, IT systems administrator, Famur.

In terms of functionality, Famur takes advantage of VM backup, instant VM recovery, and instant granular recovery.

“An initial full backup of our entire infrastructure was made in hours, while incremental backups are carried out in minutes. Instant VM recovery saves time when recovering a whole VM, especially those larger machines, an extremely vital feature. Instant granular recovery works quickly and gives several options for restoring a file or an object to servers or downloading them,” says Chrobok.

The previous backup solution did not allow Famur to increase the backup repository space without additional costs.

“Previously, we were forced to shorten the retention period of our backups, as we could not optimize our storage space without paying additional money. When we switched to Nakivo Backup & Replication, we no longer face this issue because we can connect any large backup repository and pay only for the processors of the backup hosts,” says Chrobok.

In addition, the previous backup solution was difficult to use, complicated, and could not be upgraded easily.

“The previous solution could not be easily managed by just one person and required a team to maintain it. With Nakivo Backup & Replication, first, we saved a great deal of time on deploying and configuring the product, as well as saving time when running backup jobs. Moreover, the updates are very quick with Nakivo Backup & Replication,” he says.

The  software is user-friendly with an intuitive web interface. Backups complete successfully and reporting provides Famur more visibility into their environments. For the IT team, there is no longer a need to constantly monitor backups and fix issues.

“Backup & Replication helped us save time on backup administration in comparison to the previous product. Before, we had to deal with significant issues from time to time and we could not resolve them on our own. We had to frequently use the support service of that vendor,” says Chrobok.

With Nakivo, Famur achieved data protection for critical data and applications. The company was able to optimize backup storage space without investing additional resources. With the help of VM backup, instant VM recovery, and instant granular recovery, it was able to save time and increase the speed of backup and recovery. Moreover, the IT team now spends less time on backup administration with the help of intuitive web interface and easy upgrades.

“With the previous solution, we would have to pay for additional storage space for our backups. We were also not able to connect an additional backup repository for our backups. The decision to pick Nakivo Backup & Replication was greatly influenced by the ability to optimize storage space without incurring additional costs and we are happy with that decision,” says Waldemar.