Cinch Home Services

Cinch Home Services Delivers Operational Excellence with the Implementation of ExaGrid's Disk-Based Backup with Data Deduplication

Customer Overview

Cinch Home Services is the leading home services company that makes it easy for everyone to enjoy their home to the fullest, regardless of whether they own or rent. Building upon 40 years of proven experience, Cinch uses smart, modern tools and an award-winning customer support network to remove the guesswork around preventing, diagnosing and solving a wide variety of home-related issues. Cinch partners with expert technicians nationwide to provide unmatched service and value and continues to make strides with digital-forward strategies, platforms and initiatives that are modernizing home management services to address today’s customer needs. Cinch strives to exceed owners, renters, real estate agents and partners’ expectations, every time. Cinch Home Services, a member company of The Cross Country Group, is headquartered in Boca Raton, FL, with operations throughout North America.

Key Benefits:

Half FTE reduction in management time
Reliable & fast restores in minutes
Quick & Simple installation
Dedupe ratio at 12:1
Terrific customer support

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Disk-Based Backup Evaluated to Shorten Backup Window, Better Secure Company and Client Data

At the heart of Cinch’s business is the operational excellence on which the company prides itself. With three locations running 24/7, backups were becoming an increasing problem for Cinch, affecting the level of responsiveness the IT staff was able to provide to its internal customers as well as the reliability and timeliness of backups in general. Prior to implementing the ExaGrid, Cinch had been backing up to tape. They began their nightly backup at 8:00 p.m., and all too often the backup would still be running at 8:00 a.m. the following morning.

Not only had backups become too time intensive but restores had become increasingly challenging as well. Even if the data was on site, it would often take 20 to 30 hours to complete a restore. This window widened if the tapes had already gone off site to the Cinch tape storage vendor. In addition, because Cinch is classified as an insurer under Federal regulations, the company is required to comply with the rules that govern the insurance industry. This includes a data retention requirement of seven years. Cinch was faced with a number of problems to solve, and better, faster backups and restores – as well as regulatory retention compliance – were the business imperatives they sought to address.

The company had made the decision to migrate to Veritas Backup Exec as its backup application, so it required a solution that would integrate seamlessly with their application of choice. As part of its due diligence and evaluation of alternatives, Cinch looked closely at ExaGrid and Dell EMC Data Domain, comparing the differences in approach to deduplication and scalability as well as price. It was important to the IT department that the chosen solution best supported their executive management teamand internal customers, and reflected the high standard of quality service and support for which the company is known.

"Today is like night and day from where we were! Our backup window is down to eight hours, and we’ve been able to redeploy the time we used to spend managing our tape backups to more important initiatives. "

Chuck Matulik, Network, Systems and Telecom Manager

Business Benefits from Faster Backups, Reliable Restores, Efficient Retention

When Cinch studied its options, one of the features of the ExaGrid that the IT staff liked was the post-process deduplication. This made more sense to them from the standpoint of reducing traffic on their WAN, and since the data lands in its entirety prior to deduplication, not only is their data more secure, but a full non-deduplicated copy is readily available for speedy restores.

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).

“Today is like night and day from where we were,” said Chuck Matulik, network, systems, and telecom manager at Cinch Home Services, a member company of the Cross Country Group. “Our backup window is down to eight hours, and our dedupe ratio is currently around 12:1. We’ve been able to redeploy the time we used to spend managing our tape backups to more important initiatives.” Matulik estimates that his staff used to spend on average four hours a day dealing with tapes. After installing the ExaGrid, they now spend just a few hours a week on backups. That’s about 20 hours per week – half an FTE – that can now be spent on other IT projects.

“After installing the ExaGrid, we had a virtual server crash,” said Matulik. “The restore took mere minutes – a pittance compared to what we would have had to do before, which would have taken four to six hours or more.”

Quick and Simple Installation, Terrific Customer Support

The IT staff at Cinch found the installation to be very simple, and they were able to configure it quickly. Matulik was pleased with the support he received from ExaGrid’s installation team. “The installation was very smooth,” said Matulik. “There was great interaction between ExaGrid’s installation engineer and each of our three locations. It was extremely painless to start backing up to the ExaGrid.”

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.

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.

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