Bank Migrates from Tape to Disk, Turns on Dedupe in Backup Software

“Using tape, we weren’t getting our backups done in the timely manner that we needed,” said Tim Miller, senior vice president and manager, IT. The bank’s backup window of 12 hours was woefully insufficient to handle the full range of data FNBH needed to protect. “We got to a point
where not only were we not doing full backups, we weren’t backing up some servers at all because our backups could reach the 20-hour mark,” said Miller. The bank was far outside of its backup window and looking forward, knew the problem would continue to worsen as their volume of data invariably continued to grow. Said Miller, “We were using three LTO tape drives, and it was really bulky and often unreliable. At least weekly, if not more often, we had tapes that failed and had backup jobs that didn’t run correctly.”

In order to increase speed and reliability, FNBH decided to transition to disk-based backup and turn on deduplication in their backup software. “The deduplication in the software just wasn’t fast enough, and we weren’t getting the throughput that we needed,” said Miller. “Our dedupe ratios were only about 5:1, which was far below what we had hoped for, and we were way outside of our backup window – so much so that we never really did full backups. We backed up maybe half our data, and that took more than 12 hours.”

ExaGrid Delivers on Bank Expectations

After evaluating both ExaGrid and other disk backup solutions, the bank chose ExaGrid. The ExaGrid system integrates tightly with the bank’s existing backup application, Veritas Backup Exec. “ExaGrid was quite simply the better solution for us,” said Miller. “We got the speed we needed at a much lower price than if we had gone with any other solution.”

Scalability Provides for Data Growth

The ability to scale their system as the bank’s data increases was very important to Miller. “You never know what your data is going to look like in a few years, and I wanted a product that would allow me to easily scale; the ExaGrid provides that. It seems that ExaGrid and CDW are really on top of new technology, and the system is a very good fit for our environment.” As the bank’s data volumes continue to increase, the ExaGrid system can be scaled to accommodate additional data.

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 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.