High Dedupe Ratios Provide Savings on Retention
Bivens backs up AITX’S data in daily incrementals as well as weekly and monthly fulls, keeping the full weekly backups for three weeks and full monthly backups for up to four months. “Before switching to ExaGrid, retention was far more expensive because we continuously needed to buy more tapes, as they would fail eventually. Some tapes would go bad when we tried to restore data, so we weren’t able to restore from the point that we wanted to, and sometimes tapes were just lost. Switching to disk-based backup greatly improved the situation.”
Before using ExaGrid, Bivens had not been able to deduplicate data. He appreciates how ExaGrid’s deduplication has maximized space on the system. “One of the things we really like about ExaGrid compared to tape is that it can dedupe files from tape, so we’ve ended up saving a lot of space. Our deduplication ratios have been as high as 21:1! It’s pretty incredible when 6TB of data is crunched down to 315GB. Now, we no longer need to keep vaults of up to 300 tapes, which took up space and required time and effort to sort through.
“Using ExaGrid also provides data security. With tape vaults, we needed to be sure that tapes were secure and locked up at night. When tapes were outside the data center for transportation, there was a risk of theft or misplacement. Using a disk-based system is more secure,” said Bivens.