Bicycle Components Manufacturer SRAM Using With Nakivo

SRAM, LLC has selected Nakivo Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Founded in Chicago, IL, in 1987, SRAM has grown to be the world’s second-largest bicycle component manufacturer. Over the years, it has increased sales and added other companies to its portfolio including Sachs, RockShox, Avid, Truvativ, and Zipp. It designs and manufacturers shifters, chains, brakes, pedals, power meters, and other cycling components.

SRAM has over 17 locations worldwide that include manufacturing facilities and smaller support clubs. Its IT infrastructure is 100% virtualized and comprises 40 ESXi hosts. VMware VMs store all the company’s information, including all business-critical application servers, email systems, databases, networking, and monitoring services. For SRAM, data protection is of importance; it recognizes that no one can be completely safe from natural disasters, power outages, viruses, or human error, like accidental data deletions. All these issues could negatively impact daily operations by affecting stakeholders like employees, customers and distributors.

“In the past, we used a backup software product where agents were installed on the OS, and we were backing up to tapes every night as well. Backup to tape was our only solution if we wanted to have external storage. Since there was no cloud 20-15 years ago, we had to use tapes because we needed external storage. Then, the backup software that required agents became cumbersome to use and did not offer complete functionality. We decided to look for a comprehensive VM backup solution because we wanted not only to backup VMware VMs, but also to be able to restore files and entire VMs. With VM recovery, we wanted to eliminate the need to rebuild the whole VM from scratch, so that we could shorten the process and save time,” says Michael Noeth, head of IT operations, SRAM.

While looking at different VM backup solutions available on the market, SRAM discovered Nakivo Backup & Replication, and the product was deployed as a VMware virtual appliance, decreasing installation time and reducing complexity for SRAM.

“We had a great first experience installing and configuring the product, as everything is self-explanatory and easy to understand. With the pre-configured virtual appliance, there is also no need to maintain and license an underlying OS, and that is extremely advantageous for us,” says Noeth.

With forever-incremental backup, the company only transfers changed data to the backup repository, which results in improved performance and faster backups.

“We run forever-incremental backups every night for a major part of our VMware VMs. On average, backup jobs take from a few minutes to less than an hour maximum, depending on the type of a VM and what is stored inside it,” says Noeth.

With Backup & Replication, SRAM also receives automatic reports once a day about job completion.

“Automated reporting is fast and you get an indication of whether the backup was successful – and if it was not successful, then the report provides the details on what went wrong and how to fix it, so it is absolutely helpful,” says Noeth.

Backup copy allows SRAM to create and maintain copies of VMware backups in different locations.

“Currently, we copy backups from location to location, but keep them internally, in-house. Backup copy jobs provide a powerful way to protect our backups and ensure that they are safe, no matter what happens to our primary backups,” says Noeth.

Instant VM recovery and instant file recovery provide SRAM with the options to recover entire VMs, files, and folders.

“Instant file recovery is extremely fast, as within two to three minutes we are able to recover our files. Previously, with tapes, it took forever to recover files, and with our previous backup software, the process was more complicated and slower in general – it would usually take us at least 15 minutes,” says Noeth.

Backup & Replication deployed as a pre-configured virtual appliance provides SRAM with fast VM backup and instant VM and file recovery. With forever-incremental backup, the company can complete VM backups within a few minutes to an hour. Moreover, with Backup & Replication, SRAM can recover entire VMs, files, and folders near-instantly. Overall, the company can recover files 5X faster.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication is an easy-to-use product, and since we have at least 20 staff worldwide who are working on backups, the fact that no special training was required to operate the software is awesome. As we are still transitioning away from tapes, Nakivo Backup & Replication has proved itself to us with its functionality, ease of use, and reasonable price structure,” says Noeth.