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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

FNCB Selects ExaGrid and Veeam for Ultimate Backup Storage Plan

Customer Overview

First National Community Bank (FNCB) has been locally based for over 100 years and continues as Northeastern Pennsylvania’s premier community bank. FNCB offers a full suite of personal, small business, and commercial banking solutions with industry-leading mobile, online, and in-branch products and services. FNCB remains dedicated to the communities we serve with a mission to make your banking experience simply better.

Key Benefits:

  • Technical integration with Veeam and support for the whole integrated solution
  • Over 30% time savings managing backup
  • Up and running in just 15 minutes
  • ‘Easiest solution in the industry’ to manage
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Time Wasted Tweaking System Initiates Change

FNCB formerly had a Commvault backup solution, disk to disk to NetApp. From FNCB’s perspective, backup and restore times were a constant challenge and were completely unacceptable. FNCB has since progressed to becoming 90% virtualized.

“We would experience in some of our larger COLD storage servers a full backup that would occur over the entire weekend, some of them taking 48 hours to complete and some taking 72 hours,” said Walter Jurgiewicz, systems and desktop services manager at FNCB. “We had crossed fingers that backups would complete in time to do the next incremental because sometimes the backup window would extend into Tuesday. You can only tweak a system so much, and nothing was working for us. We got to a point where we had to take a look and see what was new out there.

“We didn’t do a proof of concept and, to be honest, I had never heard of ExaGrid before. I started digging around and doing my research, and the name stood out as our new technology officer had worked with ExaGrid before. We were highly interested in Veeam, so obviously when we were looking for a new backup storage appliance, we were particularly interested in looking at what actually works well with the Veeam offering,” said Jurgiewicz.

"I think the first question I asked after we got ExaGrid was, ‘Why isn’t everybody doing this?’ It’s the easiest solution I have ever used in my career! "

Walter Jurgiewicz, Systems/Desktop Services Manager Banking Officer

ExaGrid and Veeam Prove Strong Partnership

“It seemed that everywhere I went, I heard ‘Veeam and ExaGrid,’ so I did a demo and had lots of calls with the ExaGrid team until we felt comfortable enough that we had the right solution to match our game,” Jurgiewicz said.

“Our testing with Veeam instantly showed our servers producing faster results. Combine that with ExaGrid’s landing zone and data deduplication, and we were pretty much sold immediately. It’s actually even quicker than that – we were seeing incremental backups complete in 15 minutes and 2TB file server backups complete in an hour. That’s pretty much unheard of for us. I kick off our jobs at 6:00 or 7:00 at night with 20, 30, or 40 VMs, and they’re done before 8:30.”

Rock Solid Future

“In our banking environment where a lot of our data is hosted, I think the growth is probably a little more now than what we’ve seen in previous years. Getting everything electronically that at one time was paper- based was a major task. I estimate our data growing at 10-15%, which we will have plenty of bandwidth for. Our DR plan is multifaceted. Being a regulated institution, we’re required to keep a year’s worth of backups, and ExaGrid is perfect for replication between sites A and B. “I can now focus on so many other facets of my job. I must save at least 30% or more of my time daily,” he said.

It’s So Easy – ‘Why Isn’t Everybody Doing This?’

“I think the first question I asked after we got ExaGrid was, ‘Why isn’t everybody doing this?’ It’s the easiest solution I have ever used in my career. With FNCB, everything makes sense now. I don’t know how else to explain it. It’s a different model and it’s a different architecture that just works.

“I think it’s excellent because I don’t have training to do. Anybody who’s authorized can go into the system and understand what they’re looking at, and with a couple of clicks do the modifications they need to do. It’s so simple yet obviously complicated on the back end. It’s the easiest solution I’ve seen. I just wish more people knew about it,” said Jurgiewicz.

Seamless Integration and Support

“Installation took 15 minutes, and that’s unheard of. We obviously worked with the customer support engineer who was assigned to us, and he assisted us with the Veeam side as well. He actually took the time setting up maintenance, the call home feature, reporting – everything was aligned. Support has been one of the best parts of working with ExaGrid; you don’t get that kind of help with any other products. I get a response within an hour of sending an email, and if our support engineer needs to take a look at the system, he’s logged in within minutes,” he said.

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.

Scalability

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.

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.

 

Veeam-ExaGrid Deduplication

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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