A Long-Term Solution to Keep Pace with Data Growth

American Standard purchased its first ExaGrid system in 2009, after determining that tape could no longer keep up with the company’s rapid data growth. American Standard initially installed a total of eight ExaGrid appliances in two locations, including its New Jersey office, which cross-replicates data to its Midwest data center.

“We looked for a backup system to meet our two key requirements, which were tapeless backups and the ability to replicate our data safely offsite,” said Steve Pudimott, manager of IT services for American Standard. “Since we planned on installing systems in multiple locations, easy deployment was an important factor, and ExaGrid was also highly cost-effective.”

Since 2009, American Standard has added appliances to its existing ExaGrid configurations to keep up with increasing volume of migrated data due to multiple acquisitions. In 2013, American Standard was acquired by LIXIL Water Technology Americas (LWTA), a Tokyo-based global leader in housing and building materials, products, and services. “Since the acquisition, our data has grown almost 20% each year. LIXIL has continued to acquire other companies and their data has been migrated into our environment, resulting in significant data growth,” said Ted Green, American Standard’s lead information technology engineer.

Over the years, ExaGrid has enabled American Standard to keep pace with its growing storage needs, including at the point that the company decided to virtualize its environment, shifting much of it over to VMware and installing Veeam to manage its virtual backups The ExaGrid system can easily scale to accommodate data growth. ExaGrid’s computing software makes the system highly scalable, and when plugged into a switch, appliances of any size or age can be mixed and matched in a single system with capacities of up to a 2.7PB full backup plus retention and an ingest rate of up to 488TB per hour. Once virtualized, they appear as a single system to the backup server, and load balancing of all data across servers is automatic.

Green has taken advantage of ExaGrid’s trade-in program, which allows customers to swap out older-model appliances for new ones at a discounted rate. “The capacity at both our production site and our DR site have doubled, if not tripled, since we first installed ExaGrid, so we have added appliances over the years. Working with ExaGrid’s sales and customer support teams is a major reason why we have continued to use ExaGrid for so many years.”