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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

American Valve & Hydrant Makes Backups and Restores Faster with ExaGrid

Customer Overview

American Valve & Hydrant Manufacturing Company (AVH) is a leading manufacturer of quality water works products. The company is based in Beaumont, Texas and is a subsidiary of American Cast Iron Pipe Company.

Key Benefits:

  • Restores completed in seconds
  • Backups consistently complete within defined six-hour backup window
  • Installation was easy and straightforward
  • Seamless integration with Arcserve
  • The ExaGrid system is budget friendly
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Long Backup Times, Difficult Restores with Tape

Assistant Manager of Information Services at American Valve & Hydrant Henry Sieffers is responsible for ensuring that American Valve & Hydrant’s data is protected each and every day. The company had been backing its data up to tape but as it grew, Sieffers found that tapes filled up quickly and it became more difficult to get complete backups.

“We were sending our data first to disk and then to tape each night. Every once in a while, one of our users would create a large file during the day that would push the amount of data beyond the tape’s capacity and our backups wouldn’t finish,” said Sieffers. “Also, restoring data from tape was cumbersome and time consuming. We needed to find an alternative approach that would make our backups and restores faster and more reliable.”

"ExaGrid’s data deduplication technology does a fantastic job at compressing our data. I checked our ExaGrid system recently and expected it to be close to full but we had over 70 percent of our disk space available. "

Henry Sieffers, Assistant Manager, Information Service

ExaGrid Reduced Reliance on Tape, Made Backups Faster

AVH purchased the ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage system with data deduplication at the recommendation of its parent company’s IT staff. The ExaGrid system works alongside Arcserve Backup to protect the company’s data. AVH replicates data to a stored server and then to the ExaGrid system, which is located in the company’s disaster recovery site. The ExaGrid system is backed up once a week to tape.

“Our parent company highly recommended the ExaGrid system. We like the fact that it is disk-based so we don’t have to fool around with tapes anymore. It saves us a lot of time,” said Sieffers.

“Also, restoring data is a whole lot faster with the ExaGrid because we don’t have to search through tapes. We can do a restore in seconds.” Since installing the ExaGrid system, Sieffers said that nightly backup times have been cut from eight hours to six hours.

“Our backups are now completed each and every night and they’re so much faster,” said Sieffers. “Also, ExaGrid’s data deduplication technology does a fantastic job at compressing our data. I checked our ExaGrid system recently and expected it to be close to full, but we had over 70 percent of our disk space available.”

ExaGrid’s award-winning scale-out architecture provides customers with a consistent backup window regardless of data growth. Its unique disk-cache Landing Zone retains the most recent backup in its full undeduplicated form, enabling the fastest restores, offsite tape copies, and instant recoveries. ExaGrid’s multiple appliance models can be combined into a single system configuration, allowing full backups of up to 2.7PB with a combined ingest rate of 488TB/hr. The appliances virtualize into one another when plugged into a switch so that multiple appliance models can be mixed and matched into a single configuration.

Each appliance includes the appropriate amount of processor, memory, disk, and bandwidth for the data size, so as each appliance is virtualized into the system, performance is maintained, and backup times do not increase as data is added. Once virtualized, they appear as a single pool of long-term capacity. Capacity load balancing of all data across servers is automatic, and multiple systems can be combined for additional capacity.

Even though data is load balanced, deduplication occurs across the systems so that data migration does not cause a loss of effectiveness in deduplication. This combination of capabilities in a turnkey appliance makes the ExaGrid system easy to install, manage, and scale. ExaGrid’s architecture provides lifetime value and investment protection that no other architecture can match.

Easy Management, Superior Customer Support

The ExaGrid system was designed to be easy to set up and maintain, and ExaGrid’s industry-leading customer support team is staffed by trained, in-house level 2 engineers who are assigned to individual accounts. The system is fully supported and was designed and manufactured for maximum uptime with redundant, hot-swappable components.

“I set the ExaGrid system up with some help from our customer support engineer and it was fairly easy and straightforward,” said Sieffers. “We’ve been very impressed with ExaGrid’s customer support staff. I almost always reach them right away and they have been extremely knowledgeable and helpful.”

“We’ve been very happy with the ExaGrid system. We no longer have to deal with tape for restoring data, and our backups are now faster and far more reliable than ever before. It’s so nice to not have to worry about restoring data. We can now access information with the touch of a button. We have a great deal of confidence in the system.”

ExaGrid and Arcserve Backup

Arcserve Backup delivers reliable, enterprise-class data protection across multiple hardware and software platforms. Its proven technology — unified by a single, easy-to-use interface — enables multi-tiered protection driven by business goals and policies.

Organizations using popular backup applications can look to ExaGrid as an alternative to tape for nightly backups. ExaGrid works with existing backup applications to provide faster and more reliable backups and restores.

 

Intelligent Data Protection

ExaGrid’s turnkey disk-based backup system combines enterprise SATA/SAS drives with zone-level data deduplication, delivering a disk-based solution that is far more cost effective than simply backing up to straight disk. ExaGrid’s patented zone-level deduplication reduces the disk space needed by a range of 10:1 to 50:1 by storing only the unique bytes across backups instead of redundant data. Adaptive Deduplication performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups while providing full system resources to the backups for the fastest backups and, therefore, the shortest backup window. As data grows, only ExaGrid avoids expanding backup windows by adding full appliances in a system. ExaGrid’s unique Landing Zone keeps a full copy of the most recent backup on disk, delivering the fastest restores, VM boots in seconds to minutes, “Instant DR,” and fast tape copy. Over time, ExaGrid saves up to 50% in total system costs compared to competitive solutions by avoiding costly “forklift” upgrades.

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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