Leveraging Backup Solution to its Full Potential

When Keith Simpson first started as the IT systems administrator at Century Arms, he realized that the company’s backup environment was not being used to its fullest potential. The company had been backing up its virtual machines (VMs) on ESXi servers using Veeam to a two-site ExaGrid system; however, Simpson found that during the transition of IT staff, the ExaGrid systems were no longer being utilized, so he made it a priority to evaluate the backup environment and reestablish backups to ExaGrid.

“We had an ExaGrid appliance in our main facility and another at our executive office, halfway across the nation,” said Simpson. “I decided to establish cross-replication between the sites. Neither of the ExaGrid systems were being utilized when I started, so I quickly learned as much as possible about ExaGrid and Veeam, and contacted an ExaGrid support tech, who was helpful in assessing our next steps. We determined that we needed to add a new appliance to our system in order to have enough storage to establish cross-replication. Now, we have a hub-and-spoke configuration and not only a viable backup schedule here at our main site, but also offsite replication happening at the same time. That provides us with peace of mind, knowing that we have multiple backups on- and off-site, should the worst- case scenario happen.”

ExaGrid’s appliance models can be mixed and matched into a single scale-out system allowing a full backup of up to 2.7PB with a combined ingest rate of 488TB/hr, in a single system. The appliances automatically join the scale-out system. Each appliance includes the appropriate amount of processor, memory, disk, and bandwidth for the data size. By adding compute with capacity, the backup window remains fixed in length as the data grows. Automatic load balancing across all repositories allows for full utilization of all appliances. Data is deduplicated into an offline repository, and additionally, data is globally deduplicated across all repositories.

This combination of capabilities in a turnkey appliance makes the ExaGrid system easy to install, manage, and scale. ExaGrid’s architecture provides lifetime value and investment protection that no other architecture can match.

Short Backup Windows and Quick Restores

Simpson backs up Century Arms’ data in daily incrementals and a weekly full, and is impressed with the short backup windows. “The daily incrementals take between 30 and 90 minutes, depending on the amount of new data stored since the last backup. The full weekly backup takes a few hours. The backup windows work well with our schedule, and I set everything to run when no one is in the office, so the jobs usually start around 9:00 p.m. I like that the system emails me a report every morning about the success of the backups.”

Simpson has been impressed with how quickly data is restored from ExaGrid’s landing zone. “Our Accounting office had accidentally deleted a folder and was very happy that I was able to restore it in just ten minutes!”

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).

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.