ExaGrid’s Post Process Data Deduplication Speeds Backups and Restores, Maximizes Disk Space
Westmoreland County’s IT staff began to look for a solution that could reduce its day-to-day reliance on tape. After looking at several products on the market, the County purchased a disk-based backup system from ExaGrid.
“We looked at several different approaches to disk-based backup and we really were impressed with the ExaGrid system. We liked ExaGrid’s postprocess data deduplication and felt that it would provide faster backups than some of the other products with in-line data deduplication,” said Lehman.
ExaGrid writes backups directly to a disk-cache Landing Zone, avoiding inline processing and ensuring the highest possible backup
performance, which results in the shortest backup window. Adaptive Deduplication performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups for a strong recovery point (RPO). As data is being deduplicated to the repository, it can also be replicated to a second ExaGrid site or the public cloud for disaster recovery (DR).
“We’ve been extremely happy with ExaGrid’s data deduplication ratios and our backups are now completed well within our backup windows,” said Lehman. “Restoring data is now a painless process. With tape, we had to search through our fireproof safe for the right tape, load it into the library, inventory it and search the tape for the data. All in all, the process often took hours. With the ExaGrid system, our restores requests are completed in minutes. It really saves us a considerable amount of time.”
Since installing the ExaGrid system, Westmoreland County has been able to reduce the length of its backups each weekend from 40 hours to 26 hours. Nightly incremental backups have been reduced from eight hours to four hours.
“The beauty of the ExaGrid is that we can write multiple jobs at the same time to the system. With tape, we could only write one job at a time. It has enabled us to cut our backup window by nearly 50 percent,” said Lehman. “The ExaGrid saves us a tremendous amount of time each day because we no longer have to manage or administer tapes or troubleshoot our backups. Our staff time is valuable and the ExaGrid system has made us more productive.”