IT Staff Decides, ‘Enough Is Enough!’

When data volumes were more manageable, all of CSU’s data fit on one DLT tape. However, the University’s data increased over the years to the point that even a large tape library could no longer accommodate it all.

Prior to ExaGrid, CSU had a homegrown solution that consisted of a large file server with a lot of storage connected to a Dell tape library. The data was dumped directly to that file server, and from the file server, it went to tape. The tapes were then taken offsite to a safe deposit box where CSU stored up to six months’ worth of backups.

“Our data grew to the point that it became unwieldy, and our backup window was unwieldy to match. A full backup took about 3-1/2 to 4 days, and we were basically running backups 24 hours over 4 days,” said Roger Poore, network engineer at CSU. Not only was CSU’s backup window out of control, but retention and disaster recovery suffered as a result. Poore and his team decided, “Enough is enough,” and began to search out a viable alternative.

“In addition to ExaGrid, we looked at Dell EMC Data Domain. The Board of Regents in Georgia offers a backup solution so we looked at that as well, but that was pretty expensive and we wanted to host our own system instead of having somebody else do it for us. Overall, ExaGrid was the best solution for us, mainly because of the expandability of the system.”

Build-in Scalability Provides for Ease of System Expansion

CSU is currently storing around 45TB and will be adding more data when the University starts backing up its development and test environments. “We’ll have to have to purchase some additional ExaGrid appliances to accommodate that, and it’s nice that we can just add more appliances to the rack and not have to do a lot of configuration to make them work.”

The ExaGrid system can easily scale to accommodate data growth. ExaGrid’s software makes the system highly scalable – appliances of any size or age can be mixed and matched in a single system. A single scale-out system can take in up to a 2.7PB full backup plus retention at an ingest rate of up to 488TB per hour.

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).

ExaGrid-Veeam Combined Dedupe

Veeam uses changed block tracking to perform a level of data deduplication. ExaGrid allows Veeam deduplication and Veeam dedupe-friendly compression to stay on. ExaGrid will increase Veeam’s deduplication by a factor of about 7:1 to a total combined deduplication ratio of 14:1, reducing the storage required and saving on storage costs up front and over time.