Easily Managed Solution Inspires Confidence

Feindel installed ExaGrid appliances in eight of Freudenberg Medical’s locations worldwide, retaining Veeam as the company’s backup application. He found the installation process to be very straightforward at all of the various locations. “I had the ExaGrid appliances drop shipped to each of our facilities, and one of our local help desk staff racked and cabled each one. I worked with my ExaGrid support engineer who set up the systems, updated the firmware, and got everything running and configured according to best practices. Overall, installation went very smoothly.

“Backing up Freudenberg’s systems is one of my most critical responsibilities, and that was keeping me up at night when I first started in my position. Once we had ExaGrid in place, I could focus on improving service rather than worrying every night about whether a server would crash and what I’d do about it. I trust ExaGrid, which is more than I can say for some of the backup tools that I’ve used in the past.”

Currently, each of Freudenberg Medical’s systems replicates to a system at one of the other seven locations. “One of the selling points of ExaGrid is that you can just add another appliance to an existing system for additional storage capacity. We’re planning to expand an ExaGrid system at one of our West Coast sites, which will then become the DR site for our main office.”

Feindel finds that ExaGrid’s GUI makes it easy to monitor backups at Freudenberg Medical’s many locations. “I see them all in one web-based dashboard. I can check it in the morning to make sure all is well and then go about my day. It’s helpful to see everything in one place.”

Crisis Averted Thanks to ExaGrid’s Landing Zone

It didn’t take long for Feindel to appreciate choosing ExaGrid as his storage solution. “Shortly after I had installed our ExaGrid systems, a production server crashed, and we had to replace almost all of its hard drives. However, I was able to recover the whole system completely – at full productivity – within four hours. Without ExaGrid, that event would have been disastrous!”

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.