Drastic Reduction of Backup Window by 94%
Bluewater Power has a variety of data to back up, including Microsoft Exchange, Windows files, and SQL databases. Faasse backs up the data in daily incrementals and weekly synthetic fulls, as well as monthly backups. He starts the incrementals at the same time each night and has been impressed with how much shorter these backups became after switching to the ExaGrid-Veeam solution, which backs up the data 94% faster.
“Our nightly backups used to take eight hours, and now the same backups take just half an hour!” said Faasse. In addition, he has found that he is able to restore data in minutes, which “can’t even compare” with restoring data from tape. “Now that we use ExaGrid and Veeam, we are able to restore and back up data during business hours without any impact on our IT environment,” he added.
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). ExaGrid and Veeam can instantly recover a file or VMware virtual machine by running it directly from the ExaGrid appliance in the event that the file is lost, corrupted or encrypted or the primary storage VM becomes unavailable. This instant recovery is possible because of ExaGrid’s Landing Zone – a high-speed disk cache on the ExaGrid appliance that retains the most recent backups in their complete form. Once the primary storage environment has been brought back to a working state, the VM backed up on the ExaGrid appliance can then be migrated to primary storage for continued operation.