Vinchin makes XenServer backup simple and fast to greatly save time for popular retail group in Brazil

Vinchin Backup & Recovery is a high-standard solution for XenServer backups. Despite there’re so many features contained in this one software, setting up a comprehensive backup plan with them is still easier than we thought. It builds the solid defense line outside our key IT systems with efficiency, agility, and first-grade backup performance.

IT Manager

MiniPreço

Business Challenge

MiniPreço, founded in the city of Curitiba, Parana, Brazil, is a popular retail group in the region that brought the concept of wholesale to stores. Due to the great success of its business, along with the economy growth of Brazil, MiniPreço has now become a shopkeeper in multiple fields including restaurants, bars, stationery stores, gift shops, and more, with stores spreading across the states of Bahia, Espírito Santo and Paraná.

MiniPreço HQ virtualized business management software and ERP (enterprise resource planning) system on XenServer to catch up with the trend of IT modernization. Not only historical data from the systems need to be regularly backed up, as the resources of item update and accumulate during stores’ everyday operations, new data also needs to be protected in the right way. “Data protection plays a vital role that keeps daily workflow stably processing,” says the IT Manager from MiniPreço, “which, I believe is the same in every company. If severe data losses happen, every unit from merchandise purchasing, item distribution, and end-customer consumption will be greatly affected. That’s not the thing we want to see.”

MiniPreço once deployed a legacy backup solution, but not for very long, since it failed to do VM backups in an efficient way. “We usually only did backups in the middle of the night for all the virtual machines because we didn’t want the in-production systems to be impacted during work hours.” Says IT Manager. The reason why they made such choice is that the legacy backup solution only provides traditional LAN-based transport mode for XenServer VMs. Other than that, the lack of automated job alert leaves heavier pressure on the IT team for constant job monitoring, which causes unnecessary trouble to their daily job processing.

“That’s why we need a smarter backup solution that actually does its job for us on data protection,” says IT Manager, “or in other words, a solution which saves time and eases our mind to do more important tasks.”

Vinchin Solution

The IT Manager of MiniPreço found Vinchin Backup & Recovery via a trustworthy IT solutions provider, who is also an official Vinchin partner in Brazil, after he told the team about the company’s needs for XenServer protection. “A testing environment was then setup very quick for the software, since we were all expecting to make the switch as soon as we could.”

The first thing they headed for after quick installation was the regular VM backup job configuration in Vinchin Backup & Recovery, where LAN-Free transport mode is supported. In order to have LAN-Free backups successfully processed, they added the storage area network in the data center into the backup infrastructure beforehand. “Both the network pre-settings and backup job configs are very simple, if you follow the wizard in the console.” Says IT Manager. Since LAN-Free transport mode is no longer absent, the IT team can now schedule backups of specific VMs to run during business hours. Combined with XenServer CBT, Deduplication and Compression, both backup time and backup data size have been reduced by a high standard.

From the IT administration side, Vinchin Backup & Recovery also plays a qualified time-saver role for MiniPreço’s IT team to let them enjoy worry-free software management, not only the easy job configuration but also more subtle designs hidden in the minimalist-style console. Different from the legacy backup solution they used that lacks smart job alerts, e-mail notifications about the job status and processing results will always be sent to IT Manager and other members in the crew in time to let them what has been going on in the backup environment. “We also benefit a lot from the data visualization interface, which lets us view the entire backup infrastructure within reach of my sight,” says IT Manager, “so that we can better decide whether to optimize the allocation of resources for backups.”

Result

The IT team of MiniPreço achieves the goal of effortless XenServer VM backups with Vinchin Backup & Recovery. With LAN-Free transport mode provided in the software, non-production VMs can now be efficiently backed up during business hours with a bunch of time-saving features, working from the aspects of data reduction and speed acceleration. Job alert automation and data visualization make backup environment monitoring much more natural.

customer_story_minipreco.pdf