New Solution Built on Strong Partnerships Ends Licensing Headaches

The IT staff at the City of Kennewick have a large amount of data to manage. In addition to supporting the various city departments, the city and its IT staff also support the Bi-County Police Information Network (BiPIN) for Benton County and neighboring Franklin County, to maximize efficiency in sharing information between police departments in the two counties, with 13 entities participating.

As the previous infrastructure aged, the city decided to look into newer technology for the BiPIN, including a new recordkeeping system, as well as new hardware and software. At the same time, the IT manager encouraged city management to consider a similar upgrade for the city’s own IT environment, which was approved.

Mike O’Brien, the city’s senior systems engineer, has been responsible for backing up both the BiPIN and city data for years, and has been involved with the evolution of its backup environment. “For many years, we used Veritas Backup Exec to back up data to Quantum tape drives, and then to Dell EMC Data Domain. One of the major drawbacks of using this solution was the licensing between Backup Exec and Data Domain. We had to purchase additional licensing from both to deduplicate and then to store deduped data, and when we virtualized our environment, more licensing was required for VMware servers and VMDK saves. The licensing situation is very much analogous to buying a car without tires, and it was pretty frustrating,” he said.

“As a city department, we have to be mindful of the budget and it felt like we weren’t getting the best backup coverage for what we were paying.” The city’s VAR recommended a new solution for the IT environment: Pure Storage for primary storage, Veeam for a backup application, and ExaGrid for backup storage. The VAR sent O’Brien to a Pure Accelerate conference to learn more about the
technologies.

“At the conference, I saw the synergy between Pure, Veeam, and ExaGrid,” said O’Brien. “It was very telling that these companies work so well together and have a partnership, compared with the relationships between the older software and hardware products – quite frankly, working with our previous solution feels outdated when compared to ExaGrid’s support model, integration with backup apps, and quality of hardware equipment.”

The combination of all-flash Pure Storage, Veeam Backup & Replication software, and ExaGrid provides the most reliable and cost-effective primary storage along with the fastest and lowest cost backups with the shortest recovery times. This powerful combination increases the performance of storing, backing up, and recovering data–at a lower cost than traditional legacy storage and backup solutions.

ExaGrid-Veeam Solution Provides Faster Backups and Restores

The City of Kennewick installed two ExaGrid appliances, one to store the BiPIN data and another for the city’s data. “Using our new solution has been effortless. Our ExaGrid systems in particular are easy to work with and are very reliable, so I haven’t had to spend much time on backup administration,” said O’Brien. A wide variety of data is located on 70 production servers which are all backed up to ExaGrid.

“Our backups are incredibly fast, especially compared with how they used to run using Backup Exec and Data Domain,” said O’Brien. “Our weekend backups used to start on Friday evening and wouldn’t be finished until Monday night, sometimes even running into the Monday night incremental backup job. Now, we’ve been able to stagger various backup jobs throughout the weekend and they are finished early Sunday morning, even with gaps in between the jobs.”

O’Brien has also noticed improvements in restoring data using the ExaGrid-Veeam solution. “It’s great that Veeam can quickly restore a VM from ExaGrid’s Landing Zone and easily pull the data we need from it. I can restore data at a more comprehensive level than I was ever able to achieve with Backup Exec. I feel much better when I receive data restore requests from other staff members, such as when our SQL administrator needed a database and expected the process to take four or five hours, and I was actually able to restore the database in under thirty 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).

‘Wonderful’ Customer Support

From the beginning, O’Brien has found that ExaGrid support is proactive in maintaining the city’s ExaGrid systems. “I have never encountered such helpful support. Other vendors leave users alone to figure out configurations and updates, but my ExaGrid support engineer got in touch with me as soon as the system was online to let me know he was available if I had any questions and also to set up time to optimize backups with Veeam. He also reached out to let me know when a firmware upgrade was available, explained what the new updates are, and assured me there would be no outage during the update process. Working with him has been a wonderful experience!”

O’Brien finds the ExaGrid system to be so reliable that it doesn’t require much management. “Our ExaGrid system just works, and does what we need it to do. It’s a good feeling to go home at night knowing that even if something catastrophic happens, we’ll be able restore our data quickly.”

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.