ExaGrid’s Adaptive Deduplication Provides Higher Performance
After considering several different approaches to backup, including a SAN- based solution and a competing disk-based backup solution, BI chose ExaGrid. The ExaGrid system works with BI’s existing backup application, Dell NetWorker running on Solaris.
“The SAN-based approach was costly because it would have required us to purchase a SAN on top of the cost of the software. Also, it didn’t compare in terms of functionality to the other two solutions,” said Voss. BI chose ExaGrid after evaluating both the ExaGrid system and a competing solution in its datacenter.
“We evaluated both ExaGrid and a competing solution and we were impressed with ExaGrid’s approach to data deduplication, scalability and its overall cost. In our testing, we saw a huge performance advantage over tape with the ExaGrid system. ExaGrid’s approach to backup is very efficient and it decreased the load on our backup server. This wasn’t the case with the other solution whose deduplication on-the-fly based approach, though efficient, it caused our backup times to increase.”
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 for a strong recovery point (RPO). As data is being deduplicated to the repository, it can also be replicated to a second ExaGrid site or the public cloud for disaster recovery (DR).