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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

EDENS Upgrades Infrastructure, Chooses ExaGrid after Comparison to Dell EMC Data Domain

Customer Overview

EDENS is a retail real estate owner, operator, and developer of a nationally leading portfolio of 110 places. Their purpose is to enrich community through human engagement. They know that when people come together, they feel a part of something bigger than themselves and prosperity follows – economically, socially, culturally, and soulfully. EDENS has offices in key markets including Washington, D.C., Boston, Dallas, Columbia, Atlanta, Miami, Charlotte, Houston, Denver, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.

Key Benefits:

  • ExaGrid selected due to stand- out features and integration with Veeam
  • Scalability helps EDENS to restructure its environment over time
  • System reliability restores confidence in backups following a data loss with prior solution
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ExaGrid Deemed to be the ‘Right Fit’ Compared to Dell EMC Data Domain

EDENS has regional headquarters and satellite offices throughout the country and needed to find a solution that could easily manage backups at its numerous locations. When Robert McCown started as EDENS’ Director of Technology Infrastructure, he made a priority of updating the company’s infrastructure, especially in terms of cyber security. He started by virtualizing the entire environment and implementing Veeam as a backup application.

“Before updating our environment, we were only able to do local backups using NetApp in our main data center, which was synced with NetApp at our DR site. It was cumbersome because it resulted in a flat file. We were using Robocopy for backup at that point, which left us vulnerable. At our remote locations, we used NETGEAR devices, which weren’t enterprise-level storage devices,” said McCown.

McCown began looking into backup storage solutions to ensure that secure backups were available from each location. “I initially looked at Dell EMC appliances. I asked for a POC on a Dell EMC device, and I was just not impressed. I didn’t really like what I was seeing. I reached out to some peers and they recommended ExaGrid. The more I heard about the ExaGrid system, the more I liked what I heard.

After a presentation by the ExaGrid team, I realized it would be the right fit. Both Dell EMC and ExaGrid had promoted their data deduplication and replication, but ExaGrid’s features really stood out. Plus, ExaGrid’s integration with Veeam made the decision a no-brainer. “One of the biggest selling points of ExaGrid is that it’s purely a backup device. It doesn’t try to be anything else, unlike Dell EMC appliances, which try to be everything and end up falling short. ExaGrid focuses on its one function really well and that’s what has made it a good fit.”

"One of the biggest selling points of ExaGrid is that it’s purely a backup device. It doesn’t try to be anything else, unlike Dell EMC appliances, which try to be everything and end up falling short. ExaGrid focuses on its one function really well and that’s what has made it a good fit. "

Robert McCown, Director of Technology Infrastructure

Scale-Out System is Easy to Install

EDENS backs up its data in daily incrementals and replicates the backups each week to its DR site. EDENS installed ExaGrid appliances at its remote offices for local backups, which replicate to the main data center. McCown was pleased with the quick installation. “We brought all of the appliances to the main office and configured them with the help of ExaGrid customer support, and then shipped them to the remote offices, so all that was left to do at those locations was rack and stack.”

The ExaGrid system is easy to install and use and works seamlessly with the industry’s leading backup applications so that an organization can retain its investment in its existing backup
applications and processes. In addition, ExaGrid appliances can replicate to a second ExaGrid appliance at a second site or to the public cloud for DR (disaster recovery). EDENS still uses Dell EMC NAS boxes as repositories but McCown is looking to expand the ExaGrid system further to replace the boxes as they do not integrate with Veeam well enough to optimize the backup application’s features.

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.

Confidence in a Secure Solution

Prior to using ExaGrid and Veeam, McCown had used shadow copies as a way to restore data. This process could be complicated and time-consuming. “It was cumbersome to restore a file – I had to try to find it in the shadow copies and if I couldn’t find it there, then I had to look in the local robocopies. We were hit with a CryptoLocker ransomware attack when I first started at EDENS, and that was part of the driving force in updating our backup system. We lost a lot of files that we couldn’t restore, and from that time on were looking for other options.”

McCown feels secure using ExaGrid, assured that data is ready to be restored when needed. “I have peace of mind now, and that’s what I have gained the most by using ExaGrid. With my last solution, I never felt 100% confident that my backups were even adequate; I do now. I can go to the executive team and be confident that we have the backups in place that we promised them.”

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).

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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