ExaGrid and Veeam Deliver Strong Data Deduplication, Fast Recoveries
Watkins said that the first step in the process was to evaluate and select a best-of-breed backup solution designed for virtual environments, and after doing some research, the CVCC IT team decided on Veeam Backup & Recovery. The team then chose ExaGrid as its backup target after a strong recommendation by Veeam.
“We liked the tight integration between ExaGrid and Veeam,” said Watkins. “Also, we looked carefully at how the two products work together to deliver high rates of deduplication and the speed and ease of recoveries.”
Data sent through Veeam to the ExaGrid system is first deduplicated by Veeam and then is deduplicated again by the ExaGrid system. 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.
Watkins said CVCC has also been impressed with how fast VMs can be recovered by using the two products together.
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.
“Because of our experience losing data, we were particularly interested in fast VM recoveries. Instant VM Recovery enables us to recover from a disaster significantly faster than with other solutions because we can restore entire VMs from the landing zone with ‘point and click’ access,” said Watkins. “And because the ExaGrid backs up the data to a landing zone, our backup times are extremely fast. We can back up our Hyper-V cluster in less than six hours.”