City of Miami Beach

City of Miami Beach Shores Up Backups with ExaGrid

Customer Overview

The City of Miami Beach is an island city of just 7.1 square miles located on a barrier island between Biscayne Bay and the Atlantic Ocean accessible from the mainland by a series of bridges. The City was incorporated in 1915. With over seven miles of beaches, Miami Beach has been one of America’s pre eminent beach resorts for almost a century. In addition to being a popular beach destination, its identity is strongly linked to the arts and entertainment. Its rich history includes diversity in entertainment and culture, from architecture to nightclubs to fashion. The City has a population of approximately 90,000 residents.

Key Benefits:

Seamless integration with Veritas NetBackup
Effective DR solution
ExaGrid saves time & budget due to simplicity of management
Proactive customer support

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Growing Amounts of Data Put Pressure on Nightly Backups

The City of Miami Beach’s IT department is responsible for maintaining all IT-related resources and programs for the entire city, including hardware, software, and telecommunications equipment. The IT staff had been backing up nearly 3TB of data each night using a combination of disk and tape but decided to look for a new backup approach because the staff was finding it difficult to keep up with the constant pressure of protecting its rapidly growing data set.

“We were always adding disk in order to keep up with our backup demands. We began looking at data deduplication technologies in hopes of reducing our disk usage when we learned about ExaGrid,” said Chris Hipskind, senior systems administrator for the City of Miami Beach. “We were immediately impressed with ExaGrid’s postprocess approach to data deduplication, and we liked the fact that the ExaGrid is fully integrated with Veritas NetBackup, including Open Storage Option (OST) support. NetBackup is an integral part of our backup strategy, and we needed to be sure that we could retain our investment in it.”

The City chose a two-site ExaGrid system with data deduplication. One ExaGrid appliance was installed in its primary datacenter in downtown Miami Beach, and the second appliance is located offsite in another area of the City. Data is replicated between the two systems for disaster recovery.

"The ExaGrid system has given us the ability to recover and redeploy disk that we had been using for backups, and it has enabled us to get more data off tape and onto disk. That’s just better for us all around. "

Chris Hipskind, Senior Systems Administrator

Post-Process Data Deduplication Delivers High Performance

“We spent some time comparing ExaGrid’s postprocess approach to data deduplication with the inline technology offered by other vendors,” said Hipskind. “In the end, we chose ExaGrid because we liked the fact that the data is processed after it lands on the ExaGrid system. We suspected that we’d get better performance, and we haven’t been disappointed. The system works extremely well at reducing our SAN disk storage needs.”

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). Hipskind said that the IT department has differentiated retention policies for the wide array of data it protects. Since installing the ExaGrid system, he said that he has been able to better fine tune the policies and move much of the data the City had been backing up to SAN disk to the ExaGrid.

“The ExaGrid system has given us the ability to recover and redeploy disk that we had been using for backups, and it has enabled us to get more data off SAN disk and tape and onto other types of disk. That’s just better for us all around,” said Hipskind. “We’re now able to more comfortably back up our data within our backup windows because we’re going to the ExaGrid instead of a combination of disk and tape. We have fewer failures and we no longer exceed our backup window. Also, restores are much easier with the ExaGrid system. It saves us a lot of time, and it’s much more efficient.”

Scalability, Simplicity, Outstanding Customer Support

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 were surprised at how easy it was to set up the ExaGrid system. ExaGrid’s customer support team was really terrific when it came to the install. We were thinking it would be a painful installation, but our support engineer was with us step by step, and it worked out really well,” said Hipskind. “We’ve continued to be thrilled with ExaGrid’s customer support. It’s very personalized and proactive. We have a dedicated support engineer who knows our environment and monitors our systems to let us know if there are any issues. The support has been wonderful.”

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.

“The ExaGrid has made a big impact in our daily backups. With the ExaGrid, we’ve been able to reduce our reliance on SAN disk and tape, refine our backup policies, perform faster restores and more efficiently restore our data,” said Hipskind. “It works quietly in the background, but it has made a big difference in our backups.”

ExaGrid and Veritas NetBackup

Veritas NetBackup delivers high-performance data protection that scales to protect the largest enterprise environments. ExaGrid is integrated with and certified by Veritas in 9 areas, including Accelerator, AIR, single disk pool, analytics, and other areas to ensure full support of NetBackup. ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage offers the fastest backups, the fastest restores, and the only true scale-out solution as data grows to provide a fixed-length backup window and a non-network-facing tier (tiered air gap) for recovery from a ransomware event.

Intelligent Data Protection

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).

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