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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid-Veeam Solution Strengthens Data Protection for Arpège and Its Customers

Customer Overview

Arpège supports over 1,500 local authorities in modernizing, securing, and optimizing their organizations to offer a unique citizen experience. Arpège provides management and optimization solutions to government organizations and private companies, including web hosting and training services. Arpège’s ambition is to become a key player in the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC).

Key Benefits:

  • ExaGrid chosen for unique landing zone and seamless integration with Veeam
  • 10X shorter backup windows
  • Increased retention, fast recoveries, instant VM restores
  • Arpège is confident in the security of customer data
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A Mix of Solutions Led to a Problematic Environment

Arpège had been experiencing many issues in its backup environment, which was made up of a mix of solutions such as backup scripts to a Dell NAS box managed by Quest vRanger software and to a Dell tape library managed by Veritas Backup Exec.

One major issue was that not all the data could be backed up due to low retention capacity, and another was the long backup windows Arpège was experiencing, including a backup of Oracle data that took as long as 12 hours to complete.

Olivier Orieux, Arpège’s head of infrastructure, looked for a single solution that would solve the backup issues, comparing Dell EMC Data Domain, Quest Rapid Recovery, and ExaGrid. He was impressed by the presentation of the ExaGrid team as well as the diligence ExaGrid put into learning Arpège’s environment and properly sizing a system that matched the company’s needs.

“There were many reasons why we chose ExaGrid, one of which was its landing zone, which would enable shorter backup windows and faster restores. Another was the data security that the system provides.” Mr. Orieux had also decided to purchase Veeam, which was another major factor in choosing ExaGrid, as the two products integrate well.

"ExaGrid technical support is provided in French, which is quite rare to find in the IT sector! "

Olivier Orieux, Head of Infrastructure

ExaGrid Helps Arpège Offer Quality Service to Its Customers

Arpège installed ExaGrid systems at its primary site and at a DR site. The company uses ExaGrid to back up the 500+ websites it hosts and to store data for over 400 customers, which is mostly in database form.

“There is so much value in using ExaGrid; the system’s landing zone and security features help us better serve our customers. ExaGrid has allowed us to increase our retention to eight days, so now we can recover data instantly from the landing zone if it is within that timeframe. Plus, using ExaGrid and Veeam allows us to instantly restore a VM. Of particular importance, ExaGrid allows us to be sure that customer data is secure and cannot be accessed by anyone else,” said Mr. Orieux.

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 so that an RTO and RPO can be easily met. Available system cycles are utilized to perform deduplication and offsite replication for an optimal recovery point at the disaster recovery site. Once complete, the onsite data is protected and immediately available in its full undeduplicated form for fast restores, VM Instant Recoveries, and tape copies while the offsite data is ready for disaster recovery.

ExaGrid and Veeam can instantly recover a VMware virtual machine by running it directly from the ExaGrid appliance in the event that the primary storage VM becomes unavailable. This is possible because of ExaGrid’s Landing Zone – a high-speed disk cache on the ExaGrid appliance that retains the most recent backups in complete form.

Once the primary storage environment has been brought back to a working state, the VM running on the ExaGrid appliance can then be migrated to primary storage for continued operation

Proactive Support Provides Confidence in Product

Mr. Orieux found that the ExaGrid system was easy to install with the guidance of ExaGrid support. He appreciates working with an assigned customer support engineer that knows Arpège’s environment and has found the experience to be much different than working with other vendors, who have left him “totally alone” to implement and install other products.

“ExaGrid’s support has reinforced that we made the right choice for our backup solution. My support engineer is proactive and often suggests ways to optimize our system. And, ExaGrid technical support is provided in French, which is quite rare to find in the IT sector!”

“It is so important that we can rely on ExaGrid for its high-quality support because it provides us with confidence that we are offering the best solutions and services to our customers as well.”

Maximized Storage Capacity and 10x Shorter Backup Windows

Mr. Orieux backs up data in daily incrementals. ExaGrid’s deduplication has maximized the space available, allowing Arpège to back up more data than ever. “ExaGrid allows us to have more flexibility with data storage backup, in terms of backup jobs.”

On top of being able to back up more data, Mr. Orieux has found that backups take much less time using ExaGrid than the previous solution, especially for Oracle data. “The size of our Oracle backups has been reduced thanks to ExaGrid’s and Veeam’s deduplication, allowing the backups to run very quickly, about ten times faster than before.”

Veeam uses the information from VMware and Hyper-V and provides deduplication on a“per-job” basis, finding the matching areas of all the virtual disks within a backup job and using metadata to reduce the overall footprint of the backup data. Veeam also has a “dedupe friendly” compression setting which further reduces the size of the Veeam backups in a way that allows the ExaGrid system to achieve further deduplication. This approach typically achieves a 2:1 deduplication ratio.

ExaGrid is architected from the ground up to protect virtualized environments and provide deduplication as backups are taken. ExaGrid will achieve a 3:1 up to 5:1 additional deduplication rate. The net result is a combined Veeam and ExaGrid deduplication rate of 6:1 upwards to 10:1, which greatly reduces the amount of disk storage required.

ExaGrid Brings ‘Tranquility’ to the Workplace

Mr. Orieux has gained confidence in backing up data thanks to ExaGrid’s reliability. “There is now peace of mind and tranquility, as far as my work is concerned.” Mr. Orieux has also found that switching to a single solution, ExaGrid with Veeam, has freed up time in his schedule for other projects. “I used to spend at least 15 minutes per day checking on backups, plus another hour per week managing tapes. Now, I get an alert from the ExaGrid system if there is an issue, and spend less than five minutes per day to manage backups. Restoring data takes much less time now, using Veeam Explorer for Oracle in combination with ExaGrid, and can save us up to 45 minutes on a restore.”

 

ExaGrid and Veeam

The combination of ExaGrid and Veeam’s industry-leading virtual server data protection solutions allows customers to utilize Veeam Backup & Replication in VMware, vSphere, and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual environments on ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage. This combination provides fast backups and efficient data storage as well as replication to an offsite location for disaster recovery. Customers can use Veeam Backup & Replication’s built-in source-side deduplication in concert with ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage with Adaptive Deduplication to further shrink backups.

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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