Canandaigua National Bank & Trust

Canandaigua National Bank & Trust Eliminates Tape, Reduces Time Spent on Backups with ExaGrid

Customer Overview

Incorporated in 1887, Canandaigua National Bank & Trust has enjoyed a rich heritage in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York. Canandaigua National Bank & Trust has 23 community banking offices located throughout Rochester and the Finger Lakes NY region and Financial Services Centers located in Bushnell’s Basin and Geneva. Together they offer a full range of financial services for individuals, businesses, municipalities and not-for-profit organizations.

Key Benefits:

Time and cost savings realized by no longer using tape
Met goal to replicate data for disaster recovery plan
Seamless integration with CommVault
Superior customer support
Data deduplication maximizes disk space

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Desire to Eliminate Tape Led to ExaGrid

Canandaigua National Bank & Trust’s IT department had moved many of the financial institution’s backup jobs from tape to disk in an effort to streamline backup processes and simplify operations. The staff was so happy with the results that they began looking for ways to completely eliminate tape altogether. After doing some research, the bank decided to install a two-site ExaGrid Tiered Backup solution.

“We weren’t big fans of tape because it was such a pain to handle the media and to restore information,” said Mike Mandrino, vice president and chief technology officer at Canandaigua National Bank & Trust. “We were already backing up some of our data to disk so we knew that
it would make sense for us. There were several things we liked about the ExaGrid system, including its built-in data deduplication technology and the option to replicate data offsite automatically for better disaster recovery.”

The Canandaigua National Bank & Trust installed a two-site ExaGrid system to work in conjunction with its existing backup application, CommVault. The bank backs up the bulk of its data through CommVault and then to the ExaGrid, including Windows data and virtual server data. SQL server database dumps are sent directly to the ExaGrid.

“Since installing the ExaGrid system, we’ve been able to completely eliminate tape and we’re saving a significant amount of time on tape management. Our operators used to have to copy data off to tape each day and they spent a lot of time on swapping out media and dealing with jammed tapes,” said Mandrino. “Our operators don’t really have to touch the backups anymore except for when they need to perform restores. I’d say they easily save two hours a day or more on backup duties.”

"Our initial goal was to eliminate tape and the ExaGrid has enabled us to do just that. Rather than dealing with tape for hours each day, our operators now just handle user requests for file restores. "

Mike Mandrino, Vice President & Chief Technology Officer

Data Deduplication Maximizes Disk Space

Mandrino said that one of the main reasons the Canandaigua National Bank & Trust chose the ExaGrid system was its data deduplication technology.

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).

“We’re seeing data deduplication ratios as high as 10:1 or more, which goes a long way in helping us reduce the amount of data we keep on the system. Restores are also significantly faster than they were with tape,” he said.

Fast Installation, Superior Customer Support

Setting up the ExaGrid system was easy, said Mandrino.“It was fairly easy to get the system up and running. The documentation was very good and it enabled us to do the majority of the installation by ourselves. Once the system was set up, we called our support engineer and he was able to remote in and make sure that everything was working properly,” he said.

The ExaGrid system was designed to be easy to set up and maintain, and ExaGrid’s industry leading customer support team is staffed by trained, in-house engineers who are dedicated to individual accounts. The system is fully supported and was designed and manufactured for maximum uptime with redundant, hot-swappable components.

“We’ve had a phenomenal experience with ExaGrid’s customer support organization. We had a couple of issues with the system when it was first installed and we were extremely pleased with the response we received,” said Mandrino. “The response was a major part of the reason why we decided to move forward and purchase additional units for our main location. ExaGrid’s support response has been terrific.”

Scalability to Grow

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.

ExaGrid appliances contain not just disk but also processing power, memory, and bandwidth. When the system needs to expand, additional appliances are simply added to the existing system. The system scales linearly, maintaining a fixed-length backup window as data grows so customers only pay for what they need, when they need it.

“The ExaGrid system is really a ‘set it and forget it’ type of product. The data deduplication and replication features work very well,” said Mandrino. “Our initial goal was to eliminate tape and the ExaGrid has enabled us to do just that. Our operators are now able to spend time on other tasks instead of managing backups. The ExaGrid saves us lots of staff time and has enabled us to eliminate tape and improve disaster recovery.”

ExaGrid and Commvault

The Commvault backup application has a level of data deduplication. ExaGrid can ingest Commvault deduplicated data and increase the level of data deduplication by 3X providing a combined deduplication ratio of 15;1, significantly reducing the amount and cost of storage up front and over time. Instead of performing data at rest encryption in Commvault ExaGrid, performs this function in the disk drives in nanoseconds. This approach provides an increase of 20% to 30% for Commvault environments while greatly reducing storage costs.

Intelligent Data Protection

ExaGrid’s turnkey disk-based backup system combines enterprise drives with zone-level data deduplication, delivering a disk-based solution that is far more cost effective than simply backing up to disk with deduplication or using backup software deduplication to disk. ExaGrid’s patented zone-level deduplication reduces the disk space needed by a range of 10:1 to 50:1, depending on the data types and retention periods, by storing only the unique objects across backups instead of redundant data. Adaptive Deduplication performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups. As data is being deduplicated to the repository, it is also replicated to a second ExaGrid site or the public cloud for disaster recovery (DR).

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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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story