Data Loss Forces Implementation of More Reliable Backup Strategy

C&S Companies recently installed an ExaGrid appliance to ensure ease of data restoration in the event of a mass data loss and are extremely pleased with the results.

With the recent loss of several of its virtual servers because of an outage, the C&S IT staff had been forced to work a tedious 48-hour shift to get the systems back up and running. The nature and diversity of its services cause the data that C&S backs up to be a little different than many other environments. They regularly have a very large amount of new data and even when they are able to locate the backup data (a time consuming task in and of itself ), they regularly experienced painfully slow restore times due to the sluggishness of the tapes they were restoring from.

“Experiencing this painful process once was enough,” said James Harter, senior network administrator at C&S. “We immediately sought an alternate solution to avoid the potential catastrophic data loss – and the ensuing tedium of slow and unreliable restoration – from recurring. The recent outage made it very clear that we needed an immediate solution to this issue,” said Harter.

They had tried some of the software-based deduplication available in the past and were not happy with the results. They had not tried ExaGrid, but when they did their research, they realized it would potentially work well and play well with their existing backup software (Veritas Backup Exec and Quest vRanger) and infrastructure. This was a huge plus as there are so many pieces that they could not afford to change to “fit” a new backup solution.

Scalability to Grow

Of value to C&S is that the ExaGrid system can easily be expanded to accommodate more data. 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.

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.