Central San opts for ExaGrid to Prepare for Future Growth

Central Costa County Sanitary district (Central San) was established in 1946 to form a sanitary district for areas of central Contra Costa County in California. At the time, it served a community of about 15,000 and treated about 4.5 million gallons of water daily. Today, Central San collects and cleans more than 13 billion gallons of wastewater per year for nearly 500,000 residents and more than 15,000 businesses on over 3,000 parcels in central Contra Costa County.

Enormous changes have occurred since the district’s beginnings in 1946 as a small agency serving a rural area. Population growth and service area expansion, combined with advancements in processes and technologies used to collect and treat wastewater, are compounded by increased environmental awareness and stricter water quality standards. What hasn’t changed is the district’s dedication to protecting public health and the environment.

Central San provides a critical function for its community, and as the system administrator for the district, Brad Carchidi serves an equally important function in his role. With the benefit of hindsight, Carchidi is well aware of the need to be prepared for the future. He says that is one of the reasons the agency brought ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage into their IT environment.

“We wanted a more robust, future-ready backup storage solution—a system that gave us much more functionality than our legacy solution. We had been using a couple of run-of the-mill products, including Synology tape backups. We needed a solution that could grow with us, and something that offered flexibility,” he says.

ExaGrid Security Features Offer Peace of Mind

Security is top of mind for every IT organization and Central San is no different. Serving a constituency as large as Contra Costa County means the agency needs to be vigilant and proactive in their approach to securing their data.

“Every user that has access to the ExaGrid system is set up with 2FA [two-factor authentication], which is very easy to set up on ExaGrid,” says Carchidi. “There’s also role-based access that is key to security, and it’s just been a rock for us. We’ve had no problems.”

The district’s retention policy is open-ended, meaning they keep everything forever. ExaGrid can help them manage not only their data retention but equip them with the ability to quickly recover in the event of a ransomware attack.

ExaGrid appliances have a network-facing disk-cache Landing Zone 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, for longer-term retention. ExaGrid’s unique architecture and features provide comprehensive security including Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery (RTL), and through the combination of a non-network-facing tier (tiered air gap), a delayed delete policy, and immutable data objects, backup data is protected from being deleted or encrypted. ExaGrid’s offline tier is ready for recovery in the event of an attack.

“ExaGrid gives me peace of mind,” Carchidi says. “It’s always there, always humming away, always doing its thing. It makes my job easier. And the fact that ExaGrid and Veeam are so tightly integrated and combine to exponentially increase dedupe ratios is just icing on the cake.”