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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid Helps Brookline Bancorp Manage Data Growth While Improving Backup Performance

Customer Overview

Brookline Bancorp, Inc., a bank holding company with approximately $8.6 billion in assets and branch locations in eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts and operates as the holding company for Brookline Bank and Bank Rhode Island. The Company provides commercial and retail banking services and cash management and investment services to customers throughout Central New England.

Key Benefits:

  • ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture resolves datagrowth concerns
  • ExaGrid’s ransomware recovery features key to Brookline Bancorp’s decision to switch backup storage solution
  • IT team can restore data 10X faster after switch to ExaGrid
  • ExaGrid appliances at different sites easy to manage through single pane of glass
  • ExaGrid’s ‘amazing’ Customer Support lives up to claims by sales team
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Scalable ExaGrid System Replaces NAS Devices

The IT team at Brookline Bancorp had been backing up its data to NAS devices, using Veeam. As the company’s data grew, the team researched alternate backups storage solutions. “Data is one of those constantly-growing beasts within every organization. In order to effectively grow with the business, we had to rethink and re-architect our storage, and we found that ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture offered us the expandability we were looking for,” said Tim Mullen, Brookline Bancorp’s Enterprise Infrastructure Architect.

The ExaGrid system can easily scale to accommodate data growth. ExaGrid’s software makes the system highly scalable – appliances of any size or age can be mixed and matched in a single system. A single scale-out system can take in up to a 2.7PB full backup plus retention at an ingest rate of up to 488TB per hour. In addition to the scalability of the ExaGrid system, Mullen also appreciated that ExaGrid’s tiered architecture and Retention-Time Lock for Ransomware Recovery (RTL) feature which he noted as being particularly important within the financial sector.

Mullen also appreciates that ExaGrid is also headquartered in Massachusetts, as supporting local business is important to Brookline Bancorp. “I brought my research on ExaGrid to my senior management, who brought it to our board, and everybody was impressed with what the ExaGrid solution has to offer. Brookline Bancorp is a New England company and ExaGrid is also a local company, and that means a lot to us,” he said.

ExaGrid appliances have a network-facing disk-cache Landing Zone Tier (tiered air gap) where the most recent backups are stored in an undeduplicated format for fast backup and restore performance. Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing tier called the Repository Tier, where recent and retention deduplicated data is stored for longer-term retention. The combination of a non-network-facing tier (virtual air gap) plus delayed deletes and immutable data objects guards against the backup data being deleted or encrypted. ExaGrid’s offline tier is ready for recovery in the event of an attack. Brookline Bancorp installed an ExaGrid system at its primary site and its offsite colocation. “We have always had a colo site, but by implementing ExaGrid we were able to plan for a more proactive solution rather than a reactive solution. Our data is compressed, deduped, and replicated by ExaGrid, so we are saving on space, allowing us to grow as a company without trying to daisy-chain additional space in our colocation,” said Mullen.

“We are extremely fortunate that management recognized the importance of our backup storage needs and allowed us to budget for a larger ExaGrid solution, which gives us peace of mind – something you can’t buy in this business.”

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.

"Data is one of those constantly-growing beasts within every organization. In order to effectively grow with the business, we had to rethink and re-architect our storage, and we found that ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture offered us the expandability we were looking for. "

Tim Mullen, Enterprise Infrastructure Architect

ExaGrid Speeds Up Backup Jobs and Offers 10x Faster Restore Performance

Mullen backs up the Company’s 100TB of data on a daily basis with some data types also backed up on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis as well. “One of the many things I like about ExaGrid is that it frees up processes such as deduplication and encryption from the backup app servers, so I’m able to increase bandwidth and free up processes within my infrastructure, and allows me to back up my data a lot faster and restore a lot easier,” he said. “We used to run into issues with those compute-intensive processes in Veeam, and even though we threw more resources at them, they were just getting hammered. By introducing ExaGrid, we were able to leverage the compute- intensive tasks being processed through ExaGrid instead of through Veeam.”

Mullen likes that data can be quickly restored with the ExaGrid-Veeam solution. “I’ve been very impressed with the speed we are able to restore our data when testing our data restore process – over ten times faster that we’d been able to in the past.”

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).

‘Amazing’ Customer Support Lives Up to Claims by Sales Team

Mullen has been impressed with the level of customer support that ExaGrid provides. “We’ve received amazing support, which was an important factor in purchasing our ExaGrid system. The claims that were stated by the ExaGrid sales team were actually delivered by ExaGrid Customer Support, which is very rate to see,” he said.

“Our assigned support engineer gave us insight into best practices in setting up our ExaGrid system in a secure fashion and also in how to best leverage how ExaGrid integrates with Veeam. He has also helped us resolve issues with not only our ExaGrid appliance but also with our network itself, which save my team hours of research that we would’ve needed to diagnose and fix the issue.”

Mullen also appreciates how easy it is to manage multiple ExaGrid appliances on a single pane of glass. “I am able to log into on UI interface where I can mange all of my ExaGrid appliances where I can find reporting and also look into any upgrades we may need. From a vulnerability standpoint, it is also much more efficient as I can also manage any security issues from that one UI instead of logging into 10 NAS devices and updating the BIOS,” he said.

“I highly recommend ExaGrid, not only for security that it offers, but for the speed in which it processes, and the peace of mind that you’ll have once you have the product in place due to the support that you’ll receive from an expert team. I can’t say enough good things about ExaGrid Customer Support – everyone over there has been really engaging and easy to work with,” said Mullen.

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.

ExaGrid and Veeam

Veeam’s backup solutions and ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage combine for the industry’s fastest backups, fastest restores, a scale-out storage system as data grows, and a strong ransomware recovery story – all at the lowest cost.

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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