Polish Cement Producer Cementownia Warta Deploys Nakivo Backup & Replication on Qnap NAS

Cementownia Warta S.A., a Polish cement producer, has selected Nakivo Backup & Replication to protect their environment.

The plant was built between 1960 and 1963 and modernized several times. Currently, it produces up to 2 million tons of cement each year.The end user not only produces cement but also offers services like transportation, consultation, and laboratory testing. Thanks to an organized distribution network, the company’s products are available throughout Poland.

Cementownia Warta has one site, 9 physical servers, and 20 VMs working as workstations under the control of the SCADA system. All data stored in the VMs is critical for carrying out cement production processes and maintaining indicators that affect the quality of the final product. Maintaining these parameters is important for satisfying customers’ needs. Moreover, data must be available for determining warranty rights.

Previously, the plant’s data was stored on an additional disk array and synchronized manually. Such a storage approach was old-fashioned and troublesome, especially in case of recovery. The plant experienced issues that related to long backup and recovery times. Managing the backup process also required too much time and attention. After virtualizing a part of the plant’s infrastructure, the company realized that they needed to consider speeding up and facilitating the plant’s operations. A backup solution designed for virtualized environments was being considered too. This solution had to protect both virtual and physical environments while being easy-to-use for the IT team.

Backup & Replication provides data protection for virtual, physical, cloud and SaaS environments. The solution ensures that all critical data and applications are safe. The product offers backup, replication, backup to the cloud, backup to tape, backup copy, granular recovery, instant verification, de-dupe, and DR orchestration.

It offers multiple installation options and can be installed on Windows/Linux, deployed as a pre-configured virtual appliance, or installed on a NAS device.

The plant installed Backup & Replication on a Qnap NAS.

“Mastering Backup & Replication is simple and intuitive. The web interface is clear and logically consistent. After a short time, you can confidently master the web interface without getting lost,” says Grzegorz Czuba, deputy chief power engineer, Cementownia Warta. “With installation on a Qnap NAS, we basically forgot about managing backups, as everything is done automatically. Moreover, in case of issues with VMs, we can quickly and conveniently recover VMs to their correct state.“

The Nakivo solution provides the necessary technical support to contact technical engineers right from the product’s web interface. Moreover, the storage software company offers free training and deployment sessions to customers to get acquainted with the product.

“The trainer who helped us with the installation and configuration was reliable and competent, offering all needed explanations and answers to our doubts, concerns, and strictly technical questions. Support and training accelerated the process of implementing Nakivo Backup & Replication,” says Czuba.

“The solution neither interferes with our work nor consumes considerable resources,” says Czuba. Backup & Replication provides application-aware, image-based, and incremental backup of VMs.

“An initial full backup took a considerable amount of time, while incremental backups take approximately three hours to complete. VMs are backed up once a week, while physical servers are backed up twice a week. Network acceleration functionality helps us increase the data transfer speed due to the structure of our data. The speed boost was meaningful enough so that we continue to use this functionality,” he added.

Nakivo provides its client with simplicity, ease-of-use, as well as virtual and physical backups. For the plant, being able to backup a mixed environment without the need to install permanent agents is a big advantage. With virtual backup, the plant can do application-aware, image-based, and incremental backups.

With network acceleration, the plant increases the data transfer speed.

“Backup & Replication protects our mixed environment with ease and reliability. The software is easy-to-use. We could even ran the installation and configuration ourselves if we wanted to. With Backup & Replication, you just need to check every few days that everything is functioning properly, and the process literally takes a few minutes. Ultimately, we saved money, time and achieved reliability,” says Czuba.