Arrow Trans Corp. Selects Nakivo Backup & Replication

Arrow Trans Corp. (ATC) has selected Nakivo Backup & Replication to protect their environment.

ATC is a trucking company based in Elk Grove Village, IL. The company’s owner and many office employees are former truck drivers. On top of that, it regularly sends its teams for training to gain knowledge to maintain the company’s growth rate. That growth requires new IT investments in custom applications and other technologies.

The end user operates from just one site and their IT infrastructure consists of 20 physical servers and 15 VMs. The company manages the whole trucking business using VMs that store various applications, web data, the PBX phone system and Linux server applications. It decided to start virtualizing their environment using VMware to ensure availability for their customers.

Minimizing downtime was one of the company’s top priorities, as well as ensuring reliable and fast VM backup and recovery.

ATC’s IT team started converting physical servers into VMs to simplify processes. However, the new VMware setup also required a data protection solution for the virtual environment. Previously, all the backups were done manually, and the IT team spent too much time performing these routine activities. Once the IT team began using VMware, the amount of data stored and processed grew, as the company started using new applications for running the company. Thus, the IT team could no longer backup everything manually. A new approach was necessary, one that would allow automating data protection.

“We wanted a cost-effective data protection solution that was easy to set up and use. Also, we wanted to spend less time on backup management, while at the same time, improve backup performance,” says Adam Groch, system and network administrator, ATC.

Backup & Replication was deployed to help the company achieve its goal of availability for its customers by automating and simplifying VM backup and recovery. Groch was already familiar with the product, having used the software at his previous job. This made the transition smooth. Currently, Nakivo is deployed as a pre-configured VMware virtual appliance at the company. This type of deployment is very simple, as there is no need to prepare a VM and install an OS.

“Installing and configuring Nakivo Backup & Replication was a good experience for us and we also appreciate the software’s support team level of knowledge,” says Groch.

Nakivo software combines VM backup and replication in a single solution and provides near-instant recovery of full VMs and individual files for ATC. The company enjoys the simplicity as backup and replication jobs are easy to schedule on a daily or hourly basis.

“Previously, we had to copy our data manually from physical servers and that was an extremely time consuming job. With Backup & Replication, the entire process is automated, giving the IT team more time to focus on other IT projects. Moreover, we are satisfied with the performance and reliability we have seen so far, as 300GB of data can be backed up in literally 20 minutes,” says Groch.

Restoring an entire VM required too much time and too many resources in the past. With Nakivo, instant VM recovery helps the company recover all their VMs in 10 to 20 minutes. In addition, file recovery, helps the company recover individual files near-instantly, in case users delete them accidentally.

ATC now protects its critical data reliably and ensures availability of that data for their customers. VMs can be backed up and replicated on a daily or hourly basis, while entire VMs and individual files can be recovered in a few minutes. Backing up 300GB of data takes 20 minutes.

Also, since the software provides automated data protection for the company, the IT team can work on other IT tasks.

“Backup & Replication is a reliable backup solution that provides us with ease-of-use and increased backup performance. Before, the whole process was hard and time-consuming, while now everything is simple and automated. Backup & Replication is a cost-effective solution that helps us minimize risks of downtime and data loss,” says Groch.