German Tool Manufacturer HAM Precision Chooses Nakivo

Hartmetallwerkzeugfabrik Andreas Maier GmbH (HAM Precision) has selected Nakivo Backup & Replication to protect their environment.

It is a precision tool developer and manufacturer, headquartered in Schwendi, Germany. The company manufactures precision tools for a variety of industries, including automotive, aerospace and precise machining. its IT infrastructure is scattered across three data centers, all of which are virtualized on VMware, Inc.

Located in Hörenhausen, Germany, the main data center houses 47 VMs storing a variety of information, including two Microsoft Active Directory controllers, a network policy server, file servers, a print server, an ERP system, and an industrial process management system that shows the real production time for each manufactured tool.

Backup and recovery procedures are essential for HAM. Most of the failures at the company are caused by employees accidentally deleting important files and folders. Some 80% of the recovery requests are related to files and folders, while 20% are related to failures with databases and objects.

Without a proper VM backup solution in place, it might take HAM a day or two to completely recover deleted objects. Previously, the company used another solution from VMware that created VMware VM clones and copied them to an external destination. If a cloned VM was not copied correctly, the backup was immediately lost and data could not be recovered. Moreover, sending uncompressed data over the network took too much time with the previous solution. In addition, recovering the data took a long time and failed recoveries were a regular occurrence due to corrupted data or missing settings.

The previous solution also proved cumbersome and too often required manual intervention from the team. Issues arose often, especially when an admin forgot to change some settings for the network or storage. HAM also lacked a daily overview of successful and failed backup jobs and wanted a software solution could be managed centrally from a single interface.

Office 365 data was also protected via local backup.

“The manual solution from VMware proved to be the wrong choice for us. If a colleague was on holiday and no one checked on the backups, we could be left with days without having proper backups. That is why we decided to look for a new VM backup solution that would provide us with stable VM backups and give an overview of the successfully completed backups,” says Lars Weimar, head of IT, HAM.

Nakivo Backup & Replication is a data protection solution for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV and Amazon EC2 environments, as well as physical servers and workstations, Oracle Databases and Microsoft 365 data.

Nakivo Backup & Replication is easy to use and no complicated training is required to get to know the product in the department. Every IT admin can access the product via the web browser and no additional software is needed to get started. You receive all the information in one place, including an overview of how the backup jobs are progressing and whether they have completed successfully,” says Weimar.

The Nakivo solution delivers reliable protection for Microsoft 365 to ensure recoverability of mission-critical data. “We selected Nakivo Backup & Replication for Microsoft 365 to back up our mailboxes, and at the end of the migration process, we shall be protecting a total of 110 mailboxes. The possibility to recover entire mailboxes, selected files, and folders in case of user deletion is the main advantage that we see with Microsoft 365 backups,” says Lars.

Nakivo provides various installation options, including installation on QNAP NAS devices, which is the option that HAM Precision chose. Integration of Nakivo with QNAP NAS allows HAM Precision to improve the effectiveness of the entire backup process. “The installation process was super easy for us, while the web interface is clean and logical. The primary reason we chose installation of Qnap NAS was to save costs on storage and just combine hardware and software under one roof,” says Weimar.

HAM Precision performs a full backup of all their virtual machines once a week and an incremental backup every day on weekdays.

“The full backup takes nearly 18 hours and can be completed over the weekend. The incremental backups take several hours and are run every day. Once a week, we also replicate VMs from our Qnap server to an additional storage in a separate area, to ensure protection against any kind of outage or incident. This is also done for the purpose of long-term storage, as we need to keep VMs that are older than one year,” he added.

Instant VM recovery and instant granular recovery provide HAM Precision with near-instant recovery of entire VMs, files, folders, and objects.

“We first tested instant VM recovery on our dedicated server and then rolled out the functionality on our production systems. One time, we were able to recover a database with all its data and that was literally done in a few minutes. We use instant granular recovery on a daily basis. This is the most used feature, as we are able to recover deleted or corrupted files and help our employees to continue doing their jobs successfully,” says Weimar.

With Nakivo, HAM protects its environment with VM backup, VM replication, instant VM recovery and instant granular recovery. The company also makes use of the built-in Microsoft 365 backup functionality. VM backup allows the company to perform VM backups weekly and incremental backups daily. Instant VM recovery provides recovery of entire VMs and databases, in a matter of minutes. While instant granular recovery is the most used functionality that helps employees access deleted or corrupted files in a matter of minutes. Lastly, with Microsoft 365 backup, HAM Precision plans to protect 110 mailboxes in the near future.

“Our previous solution was a mess as we ran into failures, lost backups, and we just wasted too much manual time. Nakivo Backup & Replication is a reliable backup solution that helped us save costs and time, and prevented failures from happening. We invested 2 hours every day into our previous solution. Now, everything is automated, so we spend just 10 minutes a day,” says Weimar.