Flexibility to Accommodate More Data and Deploy Second System for Replication
When funds became available to replace its aging infrastructure, the city considered several different approaches before choosing ExaGrid’s disk-based backup system with data deduplication.
“We looked at Dell EMC Data Domain and a few other solutions, but the feature that stood out about the ExaGrid was its scale-out architecture because it would enable us to seamlessly scale the system as our backup needs increase,” said Byers. “We also liked that we could deploy two systems and replicate data between them for disaster recovery.”
The city purchased two ExaGrid appliances and installed one in its main datacenter in city hall and a second in its public safety building across the street. Data is replicated nightly between the two systems, which work in conjunction with Veritas Backup Exec and Veeam Backup & Recovery to back up both physical and virtual machines. 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.