Backup Times Dramatically Reduced, Improved Retention
Before installing the ExaGrid system, the school had been backing up its data from disk to tape. Now, even though the school has increased its strategy to a disk-to-disk- to-tape process, it has still seen its backup windows reduced from 24 to 30 hours to just 12 to18 hours on average for a complete weekend backup. The ExaGrid system has been delivering data deduplication ratios as high as 16:1, which has helped to improve retention from two weeks to 16 weeks.
“We’ve essentially expanded and improved our data protection portfolio in a way that also reduces our overhead. We’re keeping more copies of the data for longer periods in a way that traditionally equated to significant time and storage tradeoffs. The gains we’ve seen in retention help us to be more flexible in terms of what services we can deliver to the business and to our users. For example, we’ve been asked in the past how much it would cost to keep certain data for longer periods of time, and our answer has always been relative to tape technology and tier 1 disk costs. Now, we can be more flexible in our retention policies, enabling us to deliver on those same requests without additional investment,” Lofstrom said.
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).