High Volume of Tape Consumption, Long Backup Jobs

CGH Medical Center had been using a 60-slot tape library and going through a high volume of tape to back up and protect its data, but day-to-day tape management was a growing challenge for its IT staff, and long backup times made keeping up with backup jobs difficult.

“We had to swap out all the tapes twice a week and send them offsite to a vault, and dealing with that much tape was a challenge,” said Steve Arnold, system administrator for CGH Medical Center. “The whole process was time consuming, from day-to-day tape management to restoring data from tapes held offsite. We also needed to improve the speed of our backups because some jobs were running as long as 24 hours.”

Flexibility, Superior Data Reduction, and Fast Backup Times

Today, CHG Medical Center uses the ExaGrid system in conjunction with Micro Focus Data Protector for the majority of its data and a SQL backup utility for SQL data. However, the system supports the most popular backup applications, so the facility can choose to implement different software if requirements change at any point in the future.

“Because the ExaGrid system is independent of the backup software, we can change backup solutions without touching our infrastructure. That gives us a lot of flexibility in the future to create an environment tailored specifically to our needs,” Arnold said. ExaGrid’s data deduplication ensures efficient data reduction while delivering fast backup times.

“We looked at several different backup approaches, and we liked ExaGrid’s approach to deduplication, which reduces the data and ensures that backup jobs run as quickly as possible,” he said. “Some of the competitive products we looked at wouldn’t have been as effective, either in terms of deduplication effectiveness or backup speed.”

Scale-out Architecture Ensures Smooth Scalability

ExaGrid’s award-winning scale-out architecture provides customers with a fixed-length backup window regardless of data growth. Its unique disk-cache Landing Zone allows for the fastest backups and retains the most recent backup in its full undeduplicated form, enabling the
fastest restores.

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. “We’re confident that ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture will enable us to handle increased backup demands in the future,” said Arnold. “The ExaGrid system has made our backups more efficient, and its encryption feature will enable us securely replicate data between sites and eliminate tape – saving us a tremendous amount of time and the hassle of managing tape and performing restores.”