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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid-Veeam Solution Provides CARB with ‘Rock-Solid’ Backups

Customer Overview

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) is a part of the California Environmental Protection Agency, an organization which reports directly to the Governor’s Office in the Executive Branch of California State Government. CARB’s mission is to promote and protect public health, welfare, and ecological resources through the effective and efficient reduction of air pollutants while recognizing and considering the effects on the economy of the state.

Key Benefits:

  • CARB wanted to increase storage capacity, so Veeam recommended ExaGrid
  • ExaGrid-Veeam dedupe allows for increased retention
  • Backups no longer exceed window and are ‘rock solid’
  • CARB easily scales out ExaGrid system with additional appliances when data grows
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Veeam Recommends ExaGrid to Resolve Capacity Issues

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) had tried several backup solutions before finding one that is reliable and efficient. “After testing and using a multitude of backup platforms to back up our data to ad-hoc storage targets, we finally settled on something – Veeam and ExaGrid. The combined solution works well for us,” said Ali, IT staff member at CARB. “First, we replaced our other backup applications and software with Veeam, which was a major improvement. We were still running into storage issues, so we asked Veeam about how to improve and increase capacity, and they recommended switching to ExaGrid for our backup storage.”

ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover so that backups are written Veeam-to-Veeam versus Veeam-to-CIFS, which provides a 30% increase in backup performance. Since the Veeam Data Mover is not an open standard, it is far more secure than using CIFS and other open market protocols. In addition, because ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover, Veeam synthetic fulls can be created six times faster than any other solution. ExaGrid stores the most recent Veeam backups in an undeduplicated form in its Landing Zone and has the Veeam Data Mover running on each ExaGrid appliance and has a processor in each appliance in a scale-out architecture. This combination of Landing Zone, Veeam Data Mover, and scale-out compute provides the fastest Veeam synthetic fulls versus any other solution on the market.

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.

"Since switching to ExaGrid, there have been less headaches with our backups. I used to have to be much more involved with backup management, but now that we’re using ExaGrid, we can set it and forget it, which is great. "

Ali, IT Staff Member

‘Rock-Solid’ Backups

CARB installed an ExaGrid system at its primary site that replicates to an offsite location for disaster recovery (DR). The organization backs up terabytes of data, ranging from file servers to databases. IT staff back up the data on a daily basis, in addition to staggered weekly backups.

Backup admins have found that backups are faster and more reliable since switching to the ExaGrid- Veeam solution. “We used to have backup jobs that took over a day, and we don’t have that issue anymore. We start our backups in the evening and they are always finished by morning,” Ali said. “In the past, some of our backups were hit or miss, but now that we use ExaGrid and Veeam our backups are rock solid.”

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).

Deduplication Allows For Increased Retention

CARB backup admins have been impressed with the storage savings that the combined ExaGrid-Veeam deduplication provides. “Since we’ve added deduplication to our backup environment, we haven’t had to worry about running out of space. We used to keep a couple of weeks’ worth of backed up data, but since switching to ExaGrid, we’ve been able to increase our retention to a year’s worth,” said Ali.

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.

System Easily Scales with ExaGrid Support

As CARB’s data has grown, the organization has easily scaled out its ExaGrid system with additional ExaGrid appliances. “The process is very simple. We installed the new appliance and our ExaGrid support engineer worked with us remotely to make sure everything went smoothly.”

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. “It’s been great to work with the same support engineer each time we call, who knows our environment well. He also keeps an eye on our ExaGrid system and alerts us if there is ever an issue, such as a drive failure. Other backup products offer okay support, but ExaGrid takes it to another level. Not only has my ExaGrid support engineer been helpful with our hardware, but he is also knowledgeable about Veeam and has helped us get the most out of the integration between the two products. He’s really helpful with the overall fine-tuning of our backups,” Ali said. “Since switching to ExaGrid, there have been less headaches with our backups. I used to have to be much more involved with backup management, but now that we’re using ExaGrid, we can set it and forget it, which is great.”

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.

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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