ExaGrid and Veeam Provide ‘Seamless Backup’
Fyhr’s environment is completely virtualized and he finds that ExaGrid and Veeam provide ‘seamless backup.’ He backs up data daily in forward incrementals with Veeam, which backs up the changed data day-to-day.
“The amount of data we’re backing up on a daily basis is about 40TB of production data. We back up a mix of database environments and also a lot of proprietary manufacturing data files that relate specifically to what we do here,” Fyhr said. “Every process at our facility is backed up with hundreds of electronic data points, and all of that information about all of the materials that go through our facility is housed in the database environment.
“We also back up a large amount of user files, such as standard office documents and images. Currently, we’re keeping three weeks of all the daily backups. If we tried to restore something older than that, it would be invalid at that point. So three weeks is adequate, and we’re able to do that comfortably with the ExaGrid that we have.
“We’re getting close to a 4:1 deduplication ratio. Our total backup size is 135TB but thanks to deduplication, that takes up just 38TB. When we were using tape, it was harder to realize how much tape storage we were actually using because we had so much of it offsite at any point in time. So from that perspective, the ability to take all that data that was on hundreds of tapes and store it on one system – that’s been pretty great!”
Fyhr finds that backup jobs are running within the desired timeframe. “Most of our backups are spread across the entire 24-hour day. We’ve never had an issue with getting things completed within that time period, but if we did want to condense it down and run it in a shorter period, we could probably complete the entire daily backup within eight to ten hours. However, to keep the Veeam environment from becoming overloaded, we like to spread the backups out throughout the entire day.”