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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Secure ExaGrid System Improves Backup Performance and Data Protection for American Family Care

 

As pioneers in the urgent care practice, American Family Care® dates back to 1982. Seeing a need for services in primary care, Dr. Bruce Irwin came up with his idea for an urgent care network that could attend to the needs of non-emergency patients who were in need of immediate attention. American Family Care became the first urgent care, family care, and primary care practice in Birmingham, Alabama. More than 35 years later, the AFC brand and philosophy have spread to more than 200 facilities across 26 states, treating nearly three million patients a year. They remain one of the most widely-known and admired brands in healthcare and they expect to operate more than 500 clinics nationwide in the next five years.

Key Benefits:

  • ExaGrid’s comprehensive security features help AFC adhere to data protection policies
  • ExaGrid provides the AFC team with “top-tier” support
  • ExaGrid’s integration with Veeam results in faster backups in a shorter backup window
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"ExaGrid has eased my worries about backups and the stress of data retention. We must be vigilant with Personal Health Information (PHI) because any kind of mishandling or loss of data could result in catastrophic fines. With ExaGrid, I don’t have that concern."

Robert Clemmons, Senior Server Administrator

ExaGrid Offers Confidence in Data Protection

American Family Care (AFC) serves three million patients each year via more than 240 clinics across the county. That’s a lot of patient data to collect, protect, backup and retain. And that’s exactly what used to keep Robert Clemmons, the Senior Server Administrator at American Family Care, up at night—until ExaGrid Tiered Backup was installed.

“ExaGrid has eased my worries about backups and the stress of data retention. We must be vigilant with Personal Health Information (PHI) because any kind of mishandling or loss of data could result in catastrophic fines. With ExaGrid, I don’t have that concern,” he said.

“We have databases that we back up that include PHI, as well as servers and server data that we back up on a weekly basis,” said Clemmons. His team backs data up monthly and then incrementals for the rest of the days in the month. “I do synthetic builds throughout the week or throughout the month. It’s one full back up a month and then a synthetic full backup, but incrementals every single day so we’re able to keep many retention points.”

ExaGrid’s Integration with Veeam Improves Backup Performance

“We use ExaGrid with Veeam v12 at our primary facility to back up our entire server infrastructure. We also have an offsite data center with another ExaGrid system that we use to replicate the primary ExaGrid system,” said Clemmons.

“When I first came on board, AFC was rebuilding the entire environment, and I was given the task of handling all the servers and server backups. At the time, we were struggling with Veeam v11 and the backups and secondary backup copy jobs. It was taking from 4:00 PM until sometimes 8:00 AM the next morning, and some not completing at all and having to cancel out,” he said. “Now we have all the backups finishing before 9:00 PM by doing direct backups to the ExaGrid system rather than a secondary copy job in Veeam. It’s made a world of difference,” he said.

ExaGrid and Veeam Accelerated Data Mover help to facilitate fast backup performance. ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover so that backups are written Veeam-to-Veeam versus Veeam-to-CIFS, which provides a 30% increase in backup performance. Since the Veeam Data Mover is not an open standard, it is far more secure than using CIFS and other open market protocols. In addition, because ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover and supports Veeam Fast Clone, performing a synthetic full takes minutes and automatic resynthesis of the synthetic fulls into actual full backups takes place in parallel with backups. Resynthesis of Veeam Fast Clone synthetic fulls into ExaGrid’s Landing Zone allows for the fastest restores and VM boots in the industry.

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).

AFC Meets Data Policies and Industry Regulations with Secure ExaGrid System

As a healthcare organization, American Family Care’s IT organizations must adhere to stringent data policies and PHI regulations. The company has a seven-year data retention policy, for example. They use the ExaGrid system for on-prem, long-term storage and high-capacity storage, and rely on an offsite vendor for historical storage. This system has been working well and Clemmons credits ExaGrid for helping them meet these mandates.

Clemmons appreciates ExaGrid’s comprehensive security features. “We have 2FA set up on our production and backup and remote site. We use Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery and multi-account setups. That schema works great for us—you can have an authorized user account as well as administrative user accounts,” he said.

ExaGrid appliances have a network-facing disk-cache Landing Zone where the most recent backups are stored in an undeduplicated format for fast backup and restore performance. Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing tier called the Repository Tier, for longer-term retention. ExaGrid’s unique architecture and features provide comprehensive security including Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery (RTL), and through the combination of a non-network-facing tier (tiered air gap), a delayed delete policy, and immutable data objects, backup data is protected from being deleted or encrypted. ExaGrid’s offline tier is ready for recovery in the event of an attack.

“Top-Tier” Support

Like many in his role, Clemmons places a high value on customer support. “There are a lot of companies that do backup and disaster recovery work, but the relationship we have with our ExaGrid support engineer, coupled with his expertise, has been stellar. It’s very important to me to know that I have a vendor that I can rely on and that answers emails, that asks questions, that checks on things, that gives us a heads up.”

Clemmons appreciates the proactive engagement from his assigned ExaGrid support engineer. “I’ve got a lot of frying pans in the fire here, so when I have a vendor that’s willing to engage—and do so without being asked—it’s just amazing! ExaGrid support is top tier, better than any of my other vendors.”

ExaGrid’s industry-leading level 2 senior support engineers are assigned to individual customers, ensuring they always work with the same engineer. Customers never have to repeat themselves to various support staff, and issues get resolved quickly.

ExaGrid and Veeam

Veeam’s backup solutions and ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage combine for the industry’s fastest backups, fastest restores, a scale-out storage system as data grows, and a strong ransomware recovery story—all at the lowest cost.

About ExaGrid

ExaGrid provides Tiered Backup Storage with a unique disk-cache Landing Zone that enables fastest backups and restores, a Repository Tier that offers the lowest cost for long-term retention and enables ransomware recovery, and scale-out architecture which includes full appliances with up to 6PB full backup in a single system.

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