NAKIVO Boosts VM Backup Speed 3X while Reducing Maintenance 10X for American Electric Technologies Inc.

Business Challenge

Virtualization is at the core of the AETI IT infrastructure. The company has virtualized their business-critical applications, including Microsoft® Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory, as well as routing, telephony/PBX services, security appliances, web app, and general data serving. "Our production environment is designed heavily around VMware virtualized infrastructure to maximize our resiliency while minimizing costs and support needs," says Paul Bienvenu, Director of Information Technology at AETI. "In doing this, it is imperative that we have a backup product that we can count on to perform both reliably and effortlessly."

Over the years, AETI has been using various backup approaches in their environment, ranging from basic flat file sync/copy routines, to physical machine backup, and virtualization-specific software. As the IT team became more advanced in virtualization utilization, they moved into using a VMware-only solution as the primary product for backups. While it worked well for a time, the IT team started experiencing problems. "Our previous system did not properly manage the Exchange truncation and object level recoveries. Other things it should have done, it didn’t which resulted in hours and occasionally days of wasted time on the phone trying to get in touch with their support and work through some feasible solution. Often times they could offer none and we simply end up rebuilding/reloading everything from scratch only to await the same problem occurring a few days later down the road," said Paul.

Solution

Paul saw NAKIVO Backup & Replication in a peer conversation online and decided to implement a full trial. "Due to some challenges we encountered as a result of our specific architecture we got the chance to sample the tech support first hand and early on," said Paul. "The level and depth of support we received under our simple trial membership completely blew away even some of the most costly 'elevated' support options we had as a paying customer with other companies. It was a phenomenal experience!"

After deploying NAKIVO Backup & Replication Paul has also appreciated the simplicity and performance of the product. "NAKIVO has proven to be leaps and bounds above most of the other systems in regards to ease of use and expedient processing over our nightly workflows", he said. "The centralized management of the product has proven to be well-implemented dashboard for both management and providing a quick visual status of overall health/performance. The addition of features such as logs truncation for Exchange really made for a hasslefree and clean backup process."

Results

AETI is now using NAKIVO Backup & Replication to protect and recover their VMware environment. "Our backup times were reduced 3X vs. our previous product. Better yet, the worrisome occasional 'unexplained' failed backup alerts we had experienced in the other system are now non-existent," said Paul. "NAKIVO has reduced VM backup headaches down to nothing – not only improving our backup solution but restoring our ability to sleep more soundly at night."

NAKIVO has reduced the overall time investment in backup procedures 10X. "The real win is that we are NOT going to lose data should we be hit by a need for recovery – a single night of failed backups or a multiple-day delays in support from a backup vendor can mean thousands or more lost in production and data!" said Paul.

Company Profile

American Electric Technologies, Inc. (AETI) is the leader in innovative power delivery solutions and provides products, construction, and services to safely generate, distribute and utilize electrical power. Just as Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) makes the network infrastructure solutions (switches and routers) that enable the performance and reliability of computer networks, AETI makes the power infrastructure solutions (switchgear and inverters) that enable the performance and reliability of the energy industry.

For over 65 years, the company has provided power conversion, inversion, distribution, automation, and control equipment, as well as electrical instrumentation services worldwide. AETI has delivered 1,000s of multimegawatt power systems into the world's harshest environments: from off-shore salt waters to jungles with extreme humidity, from extremely hot regions (Middle East, Africa) to extremely cold environments(Canada, Russia, and Alaska).

AETI customers include traditional oil and gas companies, production operators, marine vessels, pipelines, and refineries. The company also serves traditional power generation, transmission, co-generation, and alternative energy markets, including solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, energy storage, and other renewable energy and smart grid applications. AETI is a publicly listed company (NASDAQ: AETI) with total global revenues of over $100M per year.