City of Holly Hill

City of Holly Hill, Florida Relies on ExaGrid System for Fastest, Pain-Free Backups

Customer Overview

Founded in 1880, the City of Holly Hill is located in East Central Florida, along the scenic Halifax River, between the cities of Daytona Beach and Ormond Beach. Part of a greater metropolitan area of East Central Florida, the City of Holly Hill is near the confluence of two major interstate highways that provide quick, easy access to the third largest consumer region in the United States with a population of over 17 million.

Key Benefits:

Easily able to meet 90-day retention goal
Full backups reduced by 50%
Significantly less time spent managing & administering backups
Able to “set it and forget it”
Support engineer is extremely responsive and proactive

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Growing Amounts of Data Caused Long Backup Times, Slow Network

As the IT manager for the City of Holly Hill, it’s Scott Gutauckis’ responsibility to ensure that data is backed up without fail each and every night. Gutauckis had been using tape to back up and protect a wide range of data from the City’s departments, but the tape drive lacked the capacity to keep up with increasing volumes of data, and long backup times and network slowdowns had become the norm.

“Our data is constantly growing, but in particular, we’ve seen a tremendous uptick in data from applications used by our law enforcement departments because they’re using new, more sophisticated technologies in their day-to-day work,” said Gutauckis. “Our full backups were taking between 36 and 48 hours and as a result, some of our systems were slowing down. We can’t afford network slowdowns, especially because we support emergency services. We needed a new backup solution that could improve backup speed and reliability and also reduce our reliance on tape.”

"I’d highly recommend the system. It’s really taken the worry out of our day-to-day backups, and it has the flexibility to grow to meet future demands. "

Scott Gutauckis, IT Manager

ExaGrid Delivers Strong Data Deduplication to Reduce Amount of Data Stored

After looking at various solutions on the market, the City of Holly Hill chose an ExaGrid disk backup solution with data deduplication. The ExaGrid system works with Veritas Backup Exec to back up and protect the City’s data, including police, fire, public works, and general business and accounting information.

“Data deduplication was the number one feature we were looking for in a new backup solution. General data growth is an issue for us, but one of our other issues is that our users often have multiple copies of the same file in different locations,” said Gutauckis. “ExaGrid’s data deduplication technology is extremely effective at reducing redundant data, and it helps us control the overall amount of data we’re storing. We’re now able to easily meet our 90-day retention goal.”

ExaGrid’s turnkey disk-based backup system combines enterprise drives with zone-level data deduplication, delivering a disk-based solution that is far more cost effective than simply backing up to disk with deduplication or using backup software deduplication to disk. ExaGrid’s patented zone-level deduplication reduces the disk space needed by a range of 10:1 to 50:1, depending on the data types and retention periods, by storing only the unique objects across backups instead of redundant data. Adaptive Deduplication performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups. As data is being deduplicated to the repository, it is also replicated to a second ExaGrid site or the public cloud for disaster recovery (DR).

Backup Times Significantly Reduced, Less Time Spent on Management and Administration

Gutauckis said that since installing the ExaGrid system, full backup times have been reduced from a high of 36 to 48 hours down to less than 24 hours, well within the City’s backup window. Also, he reports that he now spends less time managing and administering backups than he did with tape.

“Our backup jobs run quickly and flawlessly now, and I spend far less time working on backups. Dealing with tape was so cumbersome and I was constantly swapping out tapes, transporting them to the safe, and troubleshooting backup jobs. Now, I just check the logs each day to make sure that the nightly backup jobs ran successfully and that’s it,” said Gutauckis. “Having the ExaGrid in place has given me more time to spend on other tasks.”

Fast, Painless Installation, Superior Customer Support

Gutauckis said he worked with the dedicated customer support engineer assigned to the City’s account to install the solution. “Setting up the system was quick and painless. In fact, it probably took more time to rack up the unit than to actually get the system configured and up and running. It really is ‘set it and forget it,’” he said. “Our support engineer is extremely responsive and proactive. He’s constantly checking out the system to make sure things are running correctly, and he’s always available to answer any question I have.”

The ExaGrid system was designed to be easy to set up and operate. ExaGrid’s industry-leading level 2 senior support engineers are assigned to individual customers, ensuring they always work with the same engineer. Customer’s never have to repeat themselves to various support staff, and issues get resolved quickly.

Flexibility to Add a Second Site for Disaster Recovery, Scalability to Grow

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. “One of the things we like about the ExaGrid system is that it’s flexible. We can easily add capacity, and we can also choose to deploy a second system offsite for disaster recovery at any point in the future,” said Gutauckis. “I’d highly recommend the system. It’s really taken the worry out of our day-to-day backups, and it has the flexibility to grow to meet future demands.”

ExaGrid and Veritas Backup Exec

Veritas Backup Exec provides cost-effective, high-performance backup and recovery – including continuous data protection for Microsoft Exchange servers, Microsoft SQL servers, file servers, and workstations. High-performance agents and options provide fast, flexible, granular protection and scalable management of local and remote server backups.

Organizations using Veritas Backup Exec can look to ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage for nightly backups. ExaGrid sits behind existing backup applications, such as Veritas Backup Exec, providing faster and more reliable backups and restores. In a network running Veritas Backup Exec, using ExaGrid is as easy as pointing existing backup jobs at a NAS share on the ExaGrid system. Backup jobs are sent directly from the backup application to ExaGrid for backup to disk.

Intelligent Data Protection

About ExaGrid

ExaGrid provides Tiered Backup Storage with a unique disk-cache Landing Zone that enables fastest backups and restores, a Repository Tier that offers the lowest cost for long-term retention and enables ransomware recovery, and scale-out architecture which includes full appliances with up to 6PB full backup in a single system.

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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story