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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Austin Bank Improves Backup Performance with Switch to ExaGrid System

Customer Overview

Austin Bank is a community bank headquartered in Jacksonville, Texas with assets in excess of $1.8 billion. Bank offices are located in 33 East Texas locations within 24 cities and 12 counties. Austin Bank is locally owned and operated by the Austin Family who celebrates over 109 years of service in the Texas banking industry. Over the past 119 years, Austin Bank continues to stand tall as a strong, stable financial institution offering personal and business customers a variety of financial services

Key Benefits:

  • Austin Bank switches from SAN storage to ExaGrid after impressive evaluation
  • Since switching to ExaGrid, Austin Bank has shorter backup windows and faster restores
  • ExaGrid system easy to manage with ‘great technical support’
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ExaGrid Enhances Backup Performance

Austin Bank had been backing up its data to SAN storage using Veeam and Veritas NetBackup. The bank’s IT staff decided to look into other options for backup storage, and decided to evaluate ExaGrid. “Our reseller recommended trying ExaGrid, as they had several customers who had raved about the system,” said Shane Davenport, systems administrator at Austin Bank. “During the evaluation, we tested the ExaGrid system by backing up data with each of our different backup applications, and it worked very well with all of them. We noticed a huge improvement in the speed and performance of our backups.”

Austin Bank installed an ExaGrid system at its primary site to replicate to another ExaGrid system at its secondary site for added data protection. “The automatic replication between our ExaGrid systems is outstanding,” said Davenport. The ExaGrid system is easy to install and use and works seamlessly with all of the most frequently used backup applications, so an organization can retain its investment in existing applications and processes. In addition, ExaGrid appliances can be used at primary and secondary sites to supplement or eliminate offsite tapes with live data repositories for disaster recovery.

"Since switching to ExaGrid, we don’t run into issues anymore, and it’s great to use a system that doesn’t require any babysitting. Now, we have more time to focus on other projects. "

Shane Davenport, Systems Administrator

Shorter Backup Windows and Fast Restores

Austin Bank’s backup environment is 70% virtualized, and Davenport uses Veeam to back up the virtual servers and Veritas NetBackup for the physical servers, which consist of domain controllers located in the bank’s numerous locations. Davenport backs up the virtual servers in daily fulls, and the physical servers in daily incrementals, with a weekly full backup. “Switching to ExaGrid has cut our backup windows by a couple of hours,” he said.

In addition to shorter backup windows, Davenport has found that restoring data is a much quicker process as well. “All of the restores, from servers to individual files, have been much faster since using our ExaGrid system,” said Davenport. 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 System Easy to Manage, with ‘Great Technical Support’

Davenport has found that the ExaGrid system is easy to manage. “We used to have constant issues that needed my attention when we used SAN storage. Since switching to ExaGrid, we don’t run into issues anymore, and it’s great to use a system that doesn’t require any babysitting. Now, we have more time to focus on other projects.”

Davenport appreciates the assistance he receives from his assigned ExaGrid support engineer. “The technical support we receive from ExaGrid is one of my favorite things about using the solution. I work with the same support engineer, and if I ever have a problem, I can give her a call and she helps me resolve it. In addition to helping me with the initial configuration and set up of my ExaGrid appliance, she has been helpful in scheduling firmware upgrades that fit into our schedule.”

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.

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.

 

ExaGrid and Veritas NetBackup

Veritas NetBackup delivers high performance data protection that scales to protect the largest UNIX, Windows, Linux, OS X and NetWare environments. With complete protection from remote office to data center to vault, NetBackup offers a single console for all backup and recovery operations. Organizations using Veritas NetBackup can look to ExaGrid as an alternative to tape for nightly backups. ExaGrid sits behind existing backup applications such as NetBackup, providing faster and more reliable backups and restores. In a network running NetBackup, using ExaGrid in place of a tape backup system is as easy as pointing existing backup jobs at a NAS share on the ExaGrid system. Backup jobs are sent directly from the backup application to the ExaGrid for onsite backup to disk.

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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