Eastern Propane and Oil

Eastern Propane and Oil Reduces Backup Window by Over 80% with ExaGrid and Veeam

Customer Overview

Eastern Propane & Oil has been family owned and operated since 1932. With corporate headquarters in Rochester, NH, Eastern employs more than 400 people in 11 offices across New England. We service and supply propane and oil to more than 85,000 residential and commercial customers in communities throughout Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont. In February 2019, LP Gas Magazine ranked Eastern Propane Gas as #18 in their list of Top 50 Propane Retailers in the US.

Key Benefits:

Nightly backups reduced from up to 12 hours to just 2 hours
‘Amazing’ ExaGrid-Veeam combined deduplication maximizes storage capacity
Speed of data restores is ‘light-years’ beyond tape
Eastern can now increase retention due to tape replacement and maximized storage capacity

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ExaGrid and Veeam Replace Tape

When Eastern Propane and Oil decided to switch ERP systems, it seemed to be the ideal time to also virtualize its IT environment and modernize its backup strategy from LTO tape using Veritas Backup Exec. Following up on a recommendation, Eastern looked into ExaGrid and was impressed by the data deduplication and amount of storage that the system provides. The company also evaluated Veeam and purchased both as a new solution.

Dan Doucette, Eastern’s senior system administrator, found that the ExaGrid system was easy to install and was impressed by ExaGrid’s integration with Veeam. “Installation went off without a hitch – it was seamless. The ExaGrid system integrated well into our environment. We also installed Veeam, and the two seem to work well together.”

"Using ExaGrid and Veeam has made my job so much easier in terms of managing backups and restores – it’s definitely streamlined the process for us, and it’s very quick and easy to restore data now. The speed with which we restore data, or a virtual machine for that matter, is light-years beyond what we had before. "

Dan Doucette, Senior System Administrator

Nightly Backups Reduced by as Much as 83%

Eastern’s data consists primarily of Oracle databases and also applications from its ERP system, as well as file servers, domain controllers, and Exchange servers from Windows. Doucette backs up Eastern’s data in nightly incrementals as well as synthetic weekly fulls.

Doucette has noticed a significant reduction of his nightly backup window. “We run two nightly backup jobs, separated by operating systems, and they each take under an hour. When we were backing up to tape with Veritas Backup Exec, nightly backups could take up to 12 hours in total, depending on much the data had changed.”

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).

‘Amazing’ Deduplication Ratios

Doucette has been pleased with the combined data deduplication of ExaGrid and Veeam. “The deduplication ratios we’re seeing are amazing. Depending on the share, the ratios are anywhere from 3:1 to 5:1.”

Deduplication has maximized Eastern’s storage capacity, so Doucette plans to increase the two weeks of retention that the company had been keeping, which was limited by tape in the past. “With tape, retention was always an issue, just based on the number of tapes that we were able to store.”

ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover so that backups are written Veeam-to-Veeam versus Veeam-to-CIFS, which provides a 30% increase in backup performance. Since the Veeam Data Mover is not an open standard, it is far more secure than using CIFS and other open market protocols. In addition, because ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover, Veeam synthetic fulls can be created six times faster than any other solution. ExaGrid stores the most recent Veeam backups in an undeduplicated form in its Landing Zone and has the Veeam Data Mover running on each ExaGrid appliance and has a processor in each appliance in a scale-out architecture. This combination of Landing Zone, Veeam Data Mover, and scale-out compute provides the fastest Veeam synthetic fulls versus any other solution on the market.

Speed of Restores are ‘Light-years Beyond’ Previous Solution

Doucette has found that restoring data is a simpler process since replacing tape. “Using ExaGrid and Veeam has made my job so much easier in terms of managing backups and restores – it’s definitely streamlined the process for us, and it’s very quick and easy to restore data now. The speed with which we restore data, or a virtual machine for that matter, is light-years beyond what we had before.”

ExaGrid and Veeam can instantly recover a file or VMware virtual machine by running it directly from the ExaGrid appliance in the event that the file is lost, corrupted or encrypted or the primary storage VM becomes unavailable. This instant recovery is possible because of ExaGrid’s Landing Zone – a high-speed disk cache on the ExaGrid appliance that retains the most recent backups in their complete form. Once the primary storage environment has been brought back to a working state, the VM backed up on the ExaGrid appliance can then be migrated to primary storage for continued operation.

Responsive Customer Support is Easy to Work With

Doucette finds the ExaGrid system easy to manage, especially with the help of his assigned support engineer. “I spend five minutes or so a day looking through the email updates from ExaGrid about the success of our backup jobs. There’s a minimal amount of time that we need to spend on this device aside from upgrades, which our support engineer implements. ExaGrid’s customer support team is always easy to work with. We rarely have any issues at all and if we do, our engineer is responsive and makes sure we are taken care of.”

The ExaGrid system was designed to be easy to set up and maintain, and ExaGrid’s industry leading customer support team is staffed by trained, in-house engineers who are assigned to individual accounts. The system is fully supported, and was designed and manufactured for maximum uptime with redundant, hot-swappable components.

Simple Scalability

When Eastern needed to expand its ExaGrid system, Doucette was able to simply add another appliance. “ExaGrid pretty much handled everything. We brought in the new appliance, connected it to our network, and our ExaGrid support engineer configured it for us.”

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 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.

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.

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