‘Faster and Consistent Backups’ and Quick Restores
Essex Industries has a large amount of data to back up, from Exchange and SQL data, to other application servers and its PDM environment. “We’re a manufacturing design company, so it’s critical that data, like our engineering drawings, is backed up correctly,” said Hagen, who backs up the company’s data on a nightly and weekly basis, in addition to a monthly backup that is kept for retention. “Now that we’ve switched to the ExaGrid-Veeam solution, our backup jobs are faster and consistent, without any errors,” he said.
Hagen has also found that restoring data is a quick process, usually taking “a minute or two.” In addition, he is pleased with the restore performance during quarterly backup tests. “During the test, we run through all of our critical servers, and try to hit one file from every server, and we’re able to restore 70 servers within a couple of hours,” he said.
Since switching to the ExaGrid-Veeam solution, Hagen has been able to add a yearly backup in addition to the monthly backups stored for longer-term retention, as the backups take up less of the storage space, due to deduplication.
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 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.