German manufacturer opts for Vinchin 3 times to achieve overall efficient XenServer backup

We trust Vinchin Backup & Recovery due to its wonderful performances in XenServer backup and recovery. In fact, the solution has been so good that we bought it back three times. The compatibility with our XenServer VMs of different versions, fast backup speed, high data integrity after recovery, all of them, are the exact reasons why we stick to it.

Oliver Wilken, Head of IT

K.D. Feddersen Holding 

Business Challenge

K.D. Feddersen Holding (K.D. Feddersen) is the specialist in trade and distribution of engineering plastics, technical products, raw materials, raw polymers and specialty chemicals headquartered in Hamburg, Germany with operations worldwide. Founded in 1949, the group is the exclusive partner of prestigious global producers and has been consistently providing best quality solutions as well as products for customers around the world for over 70 years.

K.D. Feddersen's IT infrastructure consists of miscellaneous sites that scatter in Germany, UK, Europe, Austria, China and etc., running 7.1 and 8.2 XenServer versions respectively. The IT team of the corporation used different XenCenter platforms for management, which resulted in a ton of workload other than daily jobs. Meanwhile the backup is not quite easy for K.D. Feddersen stores vast amounts of data from production lines, departments information, and customer profiles, which snatches resources away from production bandwidth while backing up and the process is on a slow speed.

But none of them can stack up against data recovery issues. Business continuity is the lifeline of manufactures regardless of their sizes. The slowdown and disruption to production will not stop at its borders and departments. A minor interruption to the manufacturing process could lead to a substantial economic loss and reputation damage. K.D. Feddersen, of course, is no exception. The previous protection software has underachieved in this aspect with limited recovery choices and uncertain data integrity.

Vinchin Solution

K.D. Feddersen decides to go for Vinchin Backup & Recovery, an easy, fast, and affordable XenServer backup solution adapting to various versions. Oliver Wilken, Head of IT at the company said, “Vinchin Backup & Recovery is definitely the right one. The sales support is very responsive and solves our problems just in time. We bought it 3 times, and every time we were surprised by its updates and easiness. Lately, we promoted it to enterprise version for more great support and features.”

Vinchin Backup & Recovery offers the all-in-one administration interface of XenServer 7.1 and 8.2 for K.D. Feddersen to intensively manage backup data. The IT team of the company can be lifted of extra management workload now. 

Backup strategies available for K.D. Feddersen are varied, among which the company chooses full backup and CBT/SpeedKit-driven incremental backup under selectable scheduling. Since Changed Block Tracking requires XenServer 7.3 and higher versions, Vinchin develops a substitute for CBT, the SpeedKit, which achieves the same effect based on snapshots. The company can now back up its data at express speed and avoid production bandwidth with LAN-Free transmission. Mail alert notification reminds the IT team of situations such as running out of storage space and alike to monitor the backup in real-time. The situations and warning levels of mail alert are to be selectable.

K.D. Feddersen has instant recovery and granular recovery now for different business needs. The former enables the company to recover a failed or corrupted XenServer VM back to run within seconds, while the latter targets at a specific file that the IT staff wants to restore. With these two features, K.D. Feddersen minimizes recovery time objectives (RTO) and disturbance to the production workloads. 

The offsite backup copy of Vinchin Backup & Recovery stores backup data geographically and logically external to the core system, designating to secure data from malicious attacks and keeps a data copy in case the primary site is damaged or destroyed.“Our IT team is now allowed to establish a full and smart DR plan with these incredible functions of the solution,” said Oliver, “the disaster recovery has always been concerning for us, unfortunately, we cannot set up a satisfactory recovery strategy previously. Now we can.”

Result

Vinchin Backup & Recovery provides K.D. Feddersen with fast XenServer backup compatible with 7.1 and 8.2 versions. CBT/SpeedKit, automatic mail alert and backup schedules, all contribute to a speedy and unworried VM backup. Moreover, it is reassuring for the corporation to know that instant recovery, file-level recovery and offsite backup copy of the software are keeping the business going should anything happen.

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