Disaster Recovery Made “Brilliantly Simple” for Busy System Admin
Disaster recovery went from a topic that consumed me to one I almost never think about. Dan Watson
Infrastructure & Systems Admin CNH Industrial Reman
Unitrends Solution for CNH Industrial Reman
- VMware virtualized servers
- Physical servers
- Remote data centers
- 4.5TB of data
- Ransomware automated detection
- Rapid file recovery
- 90 days retention with cloud storage
- Full Disaster Recovery as a Service (DraaS)
The Challenge
Dan Watson, Infrastructure & Systems Admin, started working at CNH Reman several years ago. One of his first goals was to replace the old existing backup solution. After trying a few other solutions and running into problems, the company’s reseller, ConvergeOne, recommended Unitrends.
“I was certified in Veeam a long time ago. I’ve also used AppAssure and Microsoft’s Data Protection. Unitrends has been the easiest, most care-free backup solution I’ve ever used.”
Watson says, “I scoped out a Recovery Series appliance for the main datacenter and Unitrends Backup in the remote centers. ConvergeOne assured me it would be good, and they’d cover me if it blew up, so I pulled the trigger. And it’s definitely been a great decision. Had it installed in under three weeks. The whole onboarding process was maybe three WebEx’s long. We had around 4.5TB and a 200MB internet connection to move our data to the Unitrends Cloud to support our DRaaS. I throttled the upload during the day and let it run unlimited over the weekend; I think the upload started on Thursday night and finished on Tuesday. Unitrends overnighted me a drive on Thursday, I got it on Friday, shipped it back on Monday, and they never got to use it because the upload finished on its own.”
Follow Up
“The DRaaS onboarding process was over-the-top. They really did almost everything for me and did a good job of explaining things along the way. Never had a real disaster, thankfully, but we did two tests, once at the end of onboarding and once as a DR test. There are no secrets here. It’s stupid-simple. I’ve restored some SQL databases because of developer mistakes and many accidentally deleted files. Disaster recovery went from a topic that consumed me to one I almost never think about. It’s there and it just works. Brilliantly simple!”
“With the email alerts on, I rarely log into the appliance. I have used Unitrends service, but I’ve never had anything overly urgent. The engineers really know their stuff. Chat is where I thought they shined. We’re systems guys, not everything we do is between 8-5, right? A lot of days I get more done between 9-11 pm than I do all day. I’ve hit their chat support a few times with questions and I love it! Quick answers, usually with supporting entries from the KB (Knowledge Base).”
After four years with their original Unitrends appliance, CNH Reman recently upgraded to a larger Recovery Series appliance to protect their growing data footprint, and the company is looking into adding other Unitrends and Kaseya solutions to their IT toolkit.
“The Unitrends DRaaS onboarding process was over-the-top. They really did almost everything for me and did a good job of explaining things along the way.
