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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

EC Electric Chooses ExaGrid-Veeam Solution for Reliable Backup and ‘Lightning-Fast’ Restores

Customer Overview

Oregon-based EC Electric is the largest privately-held electrical contracting company in the Pacific Northwest. EC specializes in designing and installing medium-voltage and low-voltage electrical systems in five areas: Construction, Technical Systems, 24/7 Service, Energy Solutions, and Traffic.

Key Benefits:

  • EC able to restore data ‘very quickly,’ recovering VMs at ‘lightning-fast’ speed
  • ExaGrid resolves backup window issues so that EC’s backups stay on schedule
  • ExaGrid support goes ‘above and beyond’ keeping system up-to-date
  • Combined ExaGrid-Veeam deduplication keeps retention space available while data grows
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ExaGrid Chosen for ‘Seamless’ Integration with Veeam

EC Electric had been backing up its data to a storage array using Veeam. The company wanted to improve data deduplication and replication, so it decided to research new backup solutions. EC’s IT vendor strongly recommended ExaGrid, especially due to its support of the company’s existing backup application, Veeam. “ExaGrid’s integration with Veeam is seamless. It just works!” said Jay Hollett, systems administrator at EC Electric.

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.

"It’s wonderful to actually have a system that I can trust to keep running. I trust that my data is backed up and available. Thanks to ExaGrid, there’s no need for me to worry about backup anymore. "

Jay Hollett, Systems Administrator

Reliable Backup Windows

EC’s data consists of VMware and Citrix servers, SQL databases, file servers, and a Viewpoint server that houses critical information on job sites, bids, and other records. Hollett has found that using ExaGrid has improved replication from remote jobsites to its main headquarters. “In addition to VMware and ESXi servers at our primary site, we also have QNAP NAS storage at each of our job sites. We like the way that ExaGrid handles deduplication and replication. It works better than our previous system.”

Hollett backs up EC’s data daily, as well as with partial backups Wednesday through Friday, and a full on Saturday. “Our backups used to run into each other, and that was causing CPU issues, but we haven’t had any problems with that since moving to ExaGrid – the system sets them up, knocks them down, and the backup jobs are done very quickly.” In addition to short backup windows, Hollett has found that restoring data from ExaGrid’s landing zone is also a short, straightforward process. “We are able to restore data very quickly, and even a full VM restore is lightning-fast,” he said.

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.

ExaGrid Support Goes ‘Above and Beyond’

Hollett is impressed with the reliability of the ExaGrid system and also feels confident in the level of support he receives when he reaches out to his ExaGrid support engineer. “I haven’t had to call support very often; my ExaGrid system just works!” he said.

“The support has been impressive; our engineer goes above and beyond. Recently, we had a question about the best practices of a particular process with Veeam. When my support engineer logged into our system he realized there was an upgrade available for the firmware and took it upon himself to upgrade us right away.

Our ExaGrid support engineer has been, bar none, one of the best customer support technicians we’ve ever dealt with on any of the equipment we use. It’s nice to actually have a system that I can trust to keep running. I trust that my data is backed up and available. Thanks to ExaGrid, there’s no need for me to worry about backup anymore,” said Hollett.

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-Veeam Combined Deduplication

Hollett has found that the improved data deduplication from the ExaGrid-Veeam solution has made an impact on EC’s backup environment. “We are able to back up and store much more data than we did with our previous solution, and despite our data growth, the deduplication has allowed us to keep a good amount of retention space available.”

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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