LCL Bulk Transport

Bo Heinemeyer, Director of Technology at LCL Bulk Transport who’s led IT initiatives at several transportation companies. In addition to overseeing areas like software and data analytics, Heinemeyer needed a backup and data recovery solution that could protect his busy trucking company.

BDR solutions play a vital role in every business, but they can make or break a transportation company. Whether it’s the hundreds of drivers that need information on their next load or the dispatchers arranging shipments, uptime is critical. This is why Heinemeyer wasn’t happy with some deficiencies in the company’s current solution, even though it was a leading industry name.

“There were always some holes we could never figure out how we were going to fill. We were forced to get creative and figure out how to protect one server while backing up another,” he said. “Backups that should have taken 10 minutes could take an hour or two.”

Restless for a better solution, Heinemeyer began having calls with other big DBR players. Yet it was during a visit to IT community Spiceworks that he found his answer. Review after review raved about Quorum’s solution onQ. So he decided to request a demo.

The impact was immediate and intense. “The demo had a real wow factor for us,” he recalled. “Especially the cloud factor. One struggle we’d always had with our old solution involved the potential failure of our onsite devices. If that happened, how could we try to point a VPN to other sites? It would have been a nightmare to get it back up and running. The onQ demo showed us how we could fail over to a remote site. So Quorum is where we went.”

Heinemeyer’s team was impressed with onQ on a number of levels. “It was very easy to deploy—the easiest ever,” he said. “The support was great too. But it was knowing we were protected that was so invaluable.”

Heinemeyer moved on to his current role at LCL Bulk Transport. Once again he was responsible for finding and implementing the best solutions to keep the transportation company up and running. He faced a formidable job; with 20 servers to back up, and a round-the-clock business, he needed a solution that was reliable, fast and easy to use. Security was important for LCL, but uptime was the top priority. “We have more than 200 drivers on the road who need phone numbers, GPS coordinates, and information on where they’re going,” he said. “And we need to know where they are and what their future loads are—we’re scrambling without that data. But it’s not just the drivers impacted by an outage; there are other factors to protect, like payables and receivables so we can bill our customers. There is no acceptable window of downtime.”

As he began his new position, he discovered the company already had a solution in place—what he described as “an old legacy system that was a box offsite. It was expensive on a monthly basis and we had no real way of recovering if we had a disaster.”

This time Heinemeyer didn’t have to look around for a solution. “I brought onQ with me because I liked it so much. It was the only solution I wanted to bring with me, and the number one reason was peace of mind and stability.” His new team wasn’t so sure about onQ at first. “They said they already had backup – how can it be any different? But once they started the onboarding process and realized how easy it is to use onQ and test and use the sandbox, they realized it was a more robust solution.”

Today onQ protects a mix of SQL servers, web servers and print servers. “We have the physical onQ appliance with local HA failover—but it also replicates to the Quorum cloud, which involves offsite clone replication for extra protection.” Heinemeyer reiterated the value of cloud BDR: “I know that if I ever get that call, I just have to spin up a server clone and I’m up and running in minutes. We check our backups enough to know they’re operable—the testing is great – and that makes me sleep well at night.”

Heinemeyer especially appreciates how low maintenance onQ is. “It’s set it and forget it. The truth is, we really don’t have to do a whole lot. OnQ takes care of everything in terms of backup; there’s maybe a half hour of work a month to make sure everything’s working and that’s it. When we do need to restore something, it takes a few minutes. That means we can easily spin up clones in the test environment. With other products we did annual testing, but with onQ we now test monthly.”

Another benefit of the continued relationship is working with the Quorum support team. “They’re very consistent—in fact, we joke that sometimes Quorum fixes issues we didn’t even know we had.”

Given Quorum’s fast-rising profile in the BDR world, Heinemeyer is aware of the many IT teams considering adopting onQ. His advice: “Anybody who has five or more servers should have onQ in some fashion. It’s a more robust product. The onboarding is second to none—it’s so good that my expectations working with other vendors now are almost too high.” For now, Heinemeyer enjoys the peace of mind onQ gives his team. “I know that even if the worst happens, we’re protected,” he said. “That’s what onQ gives us—insurance.”