Perpetual Backups Necessitate Search for Better Solution

Dycom’s backup pain hit an all-time high when some of its backup jobs were taking as long as seven days to complete – essentially running perpetually – and the resulting bandwidth reduction was having an impact on the company’s users. Dycom sought to migrate from its Unitrends solution and Veritas Backup Exec to one that better suited its backup needs.

Scalability Provides for a Staged Rollout

Besides ExaGrid’s interoperability with Veeam, a big factor in Dycom’s selection of ExaGrid was how easy it is to expand.

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.

ExaGrid appliances contain not just disk but also processing power, memory, and bandwidth. When the system needs to expand, additional appliances are simply added to the existing system. The system scales linearly, maintaining a fixed-length backup window as data grows so customers only pay for what they need, when they need it.

Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing repository tier with automatic load balancing and global deduplication across all repositories. “It’s simply a matter of getting a new appliance, adding it to the system, and it all ties together. Actually, we moved one of our locations, and it was really straightforward. We bought an extra ExaGrid and we moved a whole site through it. We installed V Center, migrated everything to the ExaGrid, and then shipped the system to the new location. When the ExaGrid was delivered, it came right on, and we migrated everything to the new location – it was all really pretty simple,” Santana said.

Dycom’s ultimate goal is to have ExaGrid appliances in each of its 700 locations. According to Santana, for the locations that have good Internet access, Dycom is backing up to its Atlanta the ExaGrid. For the remaining locations, they’ll continue to use local storage for now and send everything to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for long-term archival. Dycom is required to keep archived data for seven years.

Once Dycom has ExaGrid appliances in place in its various locations, Santana hopes to cross-replicate for disaster recovery protection. Currently, Dycom is storing 400TB on its existing ExaGrid systems.

Backup Window Reduced, Deduplication Maximizes Storage

Santana is very pleased with how short his backup window is now. His largest backup job used to take up to seven days to complete; it now finishes in just an hour. The data deduplication ratio that Dycom is seeing with Veeam and ExaGrid combined Santana calls “unbelievable”; the deduplication of the Synology NAS that they’ve been using “doesn’t come close.”

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).

‘Fantastic’ Customer Support

Like all ExaGrid customers, Dycom works with an assigned ExaGrid level 2 support engineer to provide unmatched expertise and support continuity. “Every time I call our engineer, it’s a terrific experience. He’s always on par and willing to help, even in the beginning when we were having issues deploying. We had a guy come onsite from our reseller to deploy Veeam for us, and he was confusing. I contacted our ExaGrid engineer, and he helped us through the whole process – it was great! I could spend hours just talking about how amazing our ExaGrid engineer is! I kid you not – he’s just fantastic!

“When it comes to ExaGrid’s support, there’s no comparison to other vendors. For example, the other day I was calling a vendor and, seriously, it was close to an hour before I got somebody on the phone. When I call or email ExaGrid, I reach my engineer and get help right away. The difference is night and day,” Santana said.

ExaGrid and Veeam

Veeam’s backup solutions and ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage combine for the industry’s fastest backups, fastest restores, a scale-out storage system as data grows, and a strong ransomware recovery story – all at the lowest cost.