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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Brabants Historisch Informatie Centrum (BHIC) Selects ExaGrid and Veeam

Customer Overview

Brabants Historisch Informatie Centrum (BHIC) is the pre-eminent center for genealogical research in North Brabant, Netherlands and operates geographically within the Dutch province of Northern Brabant. The Centre services sixteen towns and two water board districts. BHIC serves not only the general public, but also organizations, institutions, local councils, water boards, and the provincial councils by responding to inquiries regarding the archives and history of the province and its inhabitants.

Key Benefits:

  • 70%+ decrease in backup window
  • Reliability and speed are key drivers for success
  • Restores are ‘hours’ faster
  • 30% time saved on administration and management of backups
  • Management UI offers useful insight
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ExaGrid Delivers Best Results

For years, BHIC backed up its business and archived data to tape, but the backup window continued to grow through the weekend, resulting in canceled backup jobs, increased stress, and wasted time managing it all. BHIC currently keeps 14 daily backups, 4 weekly backups, 12 monthly backups and a yearly backup with endless retention.

“Speed to restore was the most challenging part of our old infrastructure. I also found testing server changes or doing any health checks to be nearly impossible,” said Alex Vlekken, IT engineer at BHIC. “Our license for the then-current backup solution was ending, so we began searching for an enterprise solution. We had advice from our supplier about best next steps, which included ExaGrid. We evaluated other solutions as well as ExaGrid, and after several meetings and testing, we chose ExaGrid and Veeam to deliver the best results for our organization.”

BHIC’s goal was a fast backup that would be reliable for its virtualized environment. BHIC is looking to the future and is evaluating backup to the cloud or a disaster recovery point at another location.

"ExaGrid solves problems on its own, taking the job away from the IT department. "

Alex Vlekken, IT Engineer

Integration with Veeam Key to Successful and Reliable Backup

“The key to our solution is ExaGrid’s deduplication and integration with Veeam. It makes total sense with the amount of redundant data and the cost of physical space. We are seeing dedupe ratios with Veeam and ExaGrid combined as high as 10:1,” said Vlekken.

“Restores are much faster – hours faster! ExaGrid is so much more reliable than our old tape regime. Every job runs and always ends with success. ExaGrid solves problems on its own, taking the work away from our IT department.” With the change from its tape solution to Veeam and ExaGrid, BHIC’s backup times saw a significant reduction. According to Vlekken, “Our daily backup used to take six hours and now takes a little over one hour. The weekend backup went from sixteen hours to under five hours. I am extremely pleased with the speed and efficiency of our backup solution.”

Seamless Installation and Support Essential to Partnership

Vlekken was pleased at ExaGrid’s ease of installation and how equally short the learning curve was. “Installation was a good experience with both ExaGrid and our supplier, who had extensive knowledge of the ExaGrid system. Since installing ExaGrid, I save at least 30% of my time managing and administering our backups. With Veeam, we see the jobs in one console, so we know that jobs have been successful. For the ExaGrid system, we use the reporting via email to monitor capacity, and having a quick, sharp UI also makes my job much easier,” said Vlekken.

The ExaGrid system was designed to be easy to set up and operate. ExaGrid’s industry-leading level 2 senior support engineers are assigned to individual customers, ensuring they always work with the same engineer. Customer’s never have to repeat themselves to various support staff, and issues get resolved quickly.

Veeam-ExaGrid Combined Deduplication

Veeam uses changed block tracking to perform a level of data deduplication. ExaGrid allows Veeam deduplication and Veeam dedupe-friendly compression to stay on. ExaGrid will increase Veeam’s deduplication by a factor of about 7:1 to a total combined deduplication ratio of 14:1, reducing the storage required and saving on storage costs up front and over time.

Tiered Backup Storage Architecture Provides Superior Scalability

ExaGrid’s award-winning scale-out architecture provides customers with a fixed-length backup window regardless of data growth. Its unique disk-cache Landing Zone allows for the fastest backups and retains the most recent backup in its full undeduplicated form, enabling the fastest restores.

ExaGrid’s appliance models can be mixed and matched into a single scale-out system allowing a full backup of up to 2.7PB with a combined ingest rate of 488TB/hr, in a single system. The appliances automatically join the scale-out system. Each appliance includes the appropriate amount of processor, memory, disk, and bandwidth for the data size. By adding compute with capacity, the backup window remains fixed in length as the data grows. Automatic load balancing across all repositories allows for full utilization of all appliances. Data is deduplicated into an offline repository, and additionally, data is globally deduplicated across all repositories.

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.

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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