Vinchin helps Italian agricultural company hugely reduce Sangfor HCI backup time for integrated smart farming

Vinchin Backup & Recovery lives up to the expectations we have for perfect data protection software, which is implied in the daily operations. We had some problems with our backup process and recovery speed. It was through Vinchin solution with multithreading transmission and flexible recovery configurations that our problems are solved.

Server Administrator 

Bonifiche Ferraresi SpA Agricultural Company 

Business Challenge

Bonifiche Ferraresi SpA Agricultural Company, a historic company established in 1871, based in Jolanda di Savoia (FE), is engaged in the cultivation, processing, transformation, and marketing of agri-food products. It is the owner or holder of other land rights in estates in the provinces of Ferrara, Arezzo, Oristano, and Grosseto, totaling about 7,750 hectares, making it the largest Italian agricultural company for UAA.

In recent years, agriculture has undergone an evolution-technology has been a necessary component of any commercial farm. To keep up with the pace of modern farming, Bonifiche Ferraresi has transformed from an agricultural company that produced commodities to a cutting-edge and creative vertically integrated consumer company. The innovative precision farming techniques applied on its land make the agro-industrial production chain traceable and transparent.

Many new data opportunities have arisen as a result of the development of digital agriculture and the technology that supports it. Over the course of a whole field, information can be gathered continuously by remote sensors, satellites, and UAVs. These can keep an eye on things like soil quality, humidity, temperature, and plant health. The volume of data that these sensors may provide is staggering, and the data avalanche has massive implications and significance for making decisions.

The company then virtualized its IT systems on Sangfor HCI for better data protection and storage. And to prevent data loss or accidents, it adopted a backup software that was inept at efficient backup and recovery as the data snowballed. “The key is,” said its Server Administrator, “we must find another solution that is compatible with Sangfor HCI and at the same time, it has cures for the slow backup and recovery.”

Vinchin Solution

Bonifiche Ferraresi ended up with Vinchin Backup & Recovery, a cost-effective and compatible data solution for its Sangfor HCI. The Server Administrator said, “We compared and tested a couple of software on the market before we make a decision. Vinchin Backup & Recovery surprises us with its simplicity yet efficiency. See, the backup and recovery speeds were catastrophic because of the quantity of data. But the software got its own solutions to them. SpeedKit, multithreading transport, and settable restore configurations. We have all we want.”

Vinchin Backup & Recovery supports multithreading data transmission for a single backup or recovery task to optimize the bandwidth utilization, increase speed and shorten backup window. The number of the transmission paths is user-defined. Except for the multiline transmission, the software also has SpeedKit-driven (alternative to CBT) incremental backup, which saves changed data blocks since the last backup to cut down the backup time and create frequent backups as recovery resources in case of emergencies.

Data recovery is a matter of the company’s survival. The same goes for Bonifiche Ferraresi, an agro-tech company combined with agricultural traditions and digital technologies. To keep the recovery time at bay, Vinchin Backup & Recovery allows the company to select recovery storage and network across host/cluster restore to attain the balance between storage, resources dispatching, and networks. The cross cluster/host features of the software can restore Sangfor HCI VMs to any host in any cluster for swift disaster recovery, coupled with pre-set recovery network applied to the recovered VM and power on after the recovery switch, the time needed for recovery is reduced further.

Result

Vinchin Backup & Recovery speeds up backup by utilizing multithreading transmission, which maximizes network capacity, and a powerful SpeedKit alternative to CBT that is enabled in the incremental backup. Additionally, by choosing the target storage or network to restore and turning on the VM after recovery, it enables the IT personnel to fully stay on top of the recovery process. The Server Administrator concluded, “There is no doubt that the solution is absolutely amazing. It keeps the tasks shorter and ensures the recovery is under our control. Such a great tool with a reasonable price.”

customer_story_bonifiche_ferraresi.pdf