Business Benefits from Faster Backups, Reliable Restores, Efficient Retention
When Cinch studied its options, one of the features of the ExaGrid that the IT staff liked was the post-process deduplication. This made more sense to them from the standpoint of reducing traffic on their WAN, and since the data lands in its entirety prior to deduplication, not only is their data more secure, but a full non-deduplicated copy is readily available for speedy restores.
ExaGrid’s turnkey disk-based backup system combines enterprise drives with zone-level data deduplication, delivering a disk-based solution that is far more cost effective than simply backing up to disk with deduplication or using backup software deduplication to disk. ExaGrid’s patented zone-level deduplication reduces the disk space needed by a range of 10:1 to 50:1, depending on the data types and retention periods, by storing only the unique objects across backups instead of redundant data. Adaptive Deduplication performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups. As data is being deduplicated to the repository, it is also replicated to a second ExaGrid site or the public cloud for disaster recovery (DR).
“Today is like night and day from where we were,” said Chuck Matulik, network, systems, and telecom manager at Cinch Home Services, a member company of the Cross Country Group. “Our backup window is down to eight hours, and our dedupe ratio is currently around 12:1. We’ve been able to redeploy the time we used to spend managing our tape backups to more important initiatives.” Matulik estimates that his staff used to spend on average four hours a day dealing with tapes. After installing the ExaGrid, they now spend just a few hours a week on backups. That’s about 20 hours per week – half an FTE – that can now be spent on other IT projects.
“After installing the ExaGrid, we had a virtual server crash,” said Matulik. “The restore took mere minutes – a pittance compared to what we would have had to do before, which would have taken four to six hours or more.”