Ready to Talk to a System Engineer?

Please enter your information and we'll contact you to set up a call. Thank you!

Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

EwingCole Builds Better Backups With ExaGrid

Customer Overview

EwingCole is a nationally recognized architecture, engineering, interior design and planning firm with offices in Baltimore, Berwyn, Charlotte, Irvine, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Diego and Raleigh. Their multi-disciplinary practice is built on the core values of professional excellence, design quality and collaboration. Their goal is to provide the best total solution for our clients, the community and the environment.

Key Benefits:

  • Significant cost savings
  • Seamless integration with Veritas Backup Exec
  • Easy scalability to accommodate for future data growth
Download PDF

Time Consuming Restores and Growing Data Become Issues for Firm

EwingCole is a fast growing architectural firm with a significant amount of data to protect. The company’s IT department had been backing up its data to tape but struggled as its backup windows began to extend into the workday causing slowdowns on the network and affecting user performance.

“Retention and restore times were becoming a concern. Our backup windows were running long because we were going through as many as 15 tapes at a time for our full backups.” said Kirk Anderson, Information Technology Manager at EwingCole. “The management of that many tapes coupled with the fact that it took so much time to get tapes back onsite for restores ultimately forced us to look for another solution.”

"ExaGrid’s customer support is excellent. Their response, overall knowledge and willingness to satisfy the customer’s needs is second to none. "

Kirk Anderson, Information Technology Manager

ExaGrid Provides Cost-effective Alternative to Antiquated Tape Backup System

EwingCole selected ExaGrid and installed it in its Philadelphia office along with a second site used for disaster recovery in its Washington, D.C. office. “We looked at several other solutions, but ultimately selected ExaGrid due to the fact that it was significantly less expensive, that it worked seamlessly with our backup application and that it was recommended by our technology solutions provider – Syscom Technologies,” said Anderson.

Since installing the ExaGrid, EwingCole’s backup windows have not only been significantly shortened, but the amount of time the firm spends managing the process has also been reduced. “We are saving at least eight hours a week in management time since moving off of tape,” said Anderson.

Scalability to Meet Increased Backup Requirements

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.

“We expect our data to continue to grow over the course of the next few months, we needed to be sure that the solution we chose could grow with our needs. ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture will enable us to easily accommodate more and more data,” said Anderson.

ExaGrid and Veritas Backup Exec

Veritas Backup Exec provides cost-effective, high-performance backup and recovery – including continuous data protection for Microsoft Exchange servers, Microsoft SQL servers, file servers, and workstations. High performance agents and options provide fast, flexible, granular protection and scalable management of local and remote server backups.

Organizations using Veritas Backup Exec can look to ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage for nightly backups. ExaGrid sits behind existing backup applications, such as Veritas Backup Exec, providing faster and more reliable backups and restores. In a network running Veritas Backup Exec, using ExaGrid is as easy as pointing existing backup jobs at a NAS share on the ExaGrid system. Backup jobs are sent directly from the backup application to ExaGrid for backup to disk.

Intelligent Data Protection

ExaGrid’s turnkey disk-based backup system combines enterprise drives with zone-level data deduplication, delivering a disk-based solution that is far more cost effective than simply backing up to disk with deduplication or using backup software deduplication to disk. ExaGrid’s patented zone-level deduplication reduces the disk space needed by a range of 10:1 to 50:1, depending on the data types and retention periods, by storing only the unique objects across backups instead of redundant data. Adaptive Deduplication performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups. As data is being deduplicated to the repository, it is also replicated to a second ExaGrid site or the public cloud for disaster recovery (DR).

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.

Talk to us about your needs

ExaGrid is the expert in backup storage—it’s all we do.

Request Pricing

Our team is trained to ensure that your system is properly sized and supported to meet your growing data needs.

Contact us for pricing »

Talk With One of Our System Engineers

With ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage, each appliance in the system brings with it not only disk, but also memory, bandwidth, and processing power—all the elements needed to maintain high backup performance.

Schedule call »

Schedule Proof of Concept (POC)

Test ExaGrid by installing it in your environment to experience improved backup performance, faster restores, ease of use, and scalability. Put it to the test! 8 out of 10 who test it, decide to keep it.

Schedule now »