Maintainer builds custom trucks and steers clear of ransomware with Veeam Continuous Data Protection

The business challenges

Maintainer has been ‘Crafting a Legacy of Premium Truck Bodies’ for 45 years.

The company customizes and builds trucks for a variety of industries including construction, agriculture, mining, propane, utility, railroad, and for the government. Customers choose Maintainer because its trucks are designed to handle the toughest work environments and meet the highest quality standards, frequently exceeding the most discriminating customers’ expectations.

Designing and building the best custom trucks in the industry requires dedicated employees and intellectual property spanning nearly half a century. It also requires proprietary IT systems such as our ERP system for enterprise resource planning, our customer relationship management and configuration and design software, which connects the entire production process, from sales to design, to manufacturing.

“Making sure these systems and their data are backed up, secure and available is critical to manufacturing trucks that match customers’ specifications,” said Clark Davidson, IT Lead Specialist at Maintainer. “If we experience a disaster situation and can’t recover quickly, the business could suffer.”

Maintainer did experience a disaster situation, but the business did not suffer. Ransomware hit shortly after the IT team began a test deployment of Veeam. The first virtual machine (VM) Veeam backed up ran file servers containing intellectual property. To be safe, the team backed up that same VM with a different system — the legacy solution that had been annoyingly slow to recover.

“Ransomware encrypted data on that VM, so we tried recovering it with our legacy system, but the process was a nightmare and failed,” Davidson said. “Recovery with Veeam was fast and easy — and that’s just one reason I’m totally sold on Veeam.”

The Veeam solution

Veeam Availability Suite helps Maintainer ensure the IT systems and data that support truck design and manufacturing are backed up, secure and available. Veeam protects against ransomware, delivers continuous data protection (CDP) and helps the company follow the 3-2-1-1-0 Rule (3 different copies of data on 2 different media with 1 copy offsite and 1 copy that is air-gapped, immutable or offline and 0 backup recovery errors).

“Manufacturing high-quality, custom-built trucks requires comprehensive data protection, and that’s what Veeam provides — from ransomware protection to CDP,” Davidson said.

Here’s how: Veeam backs up nearly 9 TB of data across 45 VMware vSphere VMs on-premises and off-premises to disk and tape. Backups are safe from ransomware in immutable, hardened Linux repositories that prevent encryption as well as malicious edits or deletion. Veeam CDP provides additional resiliency by enabling recovery to any point in time. This is particularly advantageous for tier 1 workloads that must remain available for business continuity.

“Veeam gives us peace of mind knowing backups are safe and data can be restored fast,” Davidson said. “It feels like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders.”

Davidson said Veeam monitoring, reporting and capacity planning are also important. Deep visibility into the entire IT infrastructure helps Maintainer proactively resolve issues before they escalate into problems that might harm the business.

“Veeam keeps track of CPU, RAM and disk usage and space, which is especially helpful when backups hit at the busiest time of the workday,” Davidson explained. “Veeam makes sure backups continue as usual, with no impact on the business.”

Davidson said Veeam technical support is helpful too.

“Veeam’s support is top notch — it’s very rare that I have to wait for answers to my questions. Everything is easy with Veeam, from the product itself to product support.”

The results

• Recovers the ransomed file servers quickly and easily
  “In today’s world, it’s not ‘if’ ransomware will occur — it’s ‘when’ ransomware will occur,” Davidson said. “When we were hit with ransomware, we were glad we were using Veeam.”
• Protects all IT systems and data supporting truck manufacturing
  Maintainer’s competitive advantage is building custom-designed trucks that meet the highest quality standards and exceed customers’ expectations. Veeam helps Maintainer make sure manufacturing continues without a hitch.
• Provides continuous data protection and follows the 3-2-1-1-0 Rule
  Veeam CDP eliminates downtime and data loss for Maintainer’s tier 1 workloads, while hardened Linux repositories make backups immutable from ransomware.