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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Dutch Municipality Modernizes Backup Environment with ExaGrid-Veeam Solution

Customer Overview

Haaksbergen, a municipality in the Netherlands, has almost 24,500 inhabitants. In addition to the main Haaksbergen core, it is also made up of the church villages of Buurse and St. Isidorushoeve. The municipality, with a total area of 10,550 hectares, has a vast outlying area with a notable scenic landscape and beautiful nature reserves, which attract tourists each year.

Key Benefits:

  • ExaGrid-Veeam solution provides easy offsite replication
  • ExaGrid resolved Haaksbergen’s backup window spillover issues
  • IT staff saves time on backup management due to daily system reporting and expert
  • ExaGrid support
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Transforming the Backup Environment

Gemeente Haaksbergen has been using its ExaGrid system for a number of years. When ExaGrid was first implemented, the municipality used Veritas Backup Exec to copy backups from ExaGrid to tape. Recently, a second ExaGrid system was purchased to establish offsite replication and as more of the backup environment is virtualized, the backups have been migrating to the municipality’s new backup application, Veeam.

“Before we used ExaGrid we were facing capacity issues as well as dealing with backups that took too long. Now that our primary backup storage is disk-based, our backups are very fast,” said Ron de Gier, Haaksbergen’s system administrator. “We are slowly switching our backups from Backup Exec to Veeam, and we’ve found that Veeam is very easy to use. We’ve started replicating our backups from our primary site to our secondary site, and that is working great using the ExaGrid-Veeam solution,” he added.

The ExaGrid system is easy to install and use and works seamlessly with the industry’s leading backup applications so that an organization can retain its investment in its existing backup applications and processes. In addition, ExaGrid appliances can replicate to a second ExaGrid appliance at a second site or to
the public cloud for DR (disaster recovery).

"Our weekly backups used to take the entire weekend, and often weren’t even finished on Monday, which resulted in performance problems with our systems during business hours. Since switching to ExaGrid, our weekly backup only takes about five hours. That’s a large amount of data backed up in a short amount of time! "

Ron de Gier, System Administrator

Weekly Backups Reduced from Days to Hours

Haaksbergen’s data consists of databases, applications, and many complete systems which are critical to the municipality. “We back up our data in daily incrementals which creates a weekly full. Veeam manages these incrementals and after several weeks, it compresses all of the incremental backups to make a new full backup and then deletes the older incrementals. That’s the kind of intelligence we appreciate,” said de Gier.

One of the main reasons Haaksbergen switched its backups to ExaGrid was that it had struggled with slow backups using its previous system. “Our weekly backups used to take the entire weekend, and often weren’t even finished on Monday, which resulted in performance problems with our systems during business hours.

Since switching to ExaGrid, our weekly backup only takes about five hours. That’s a large amount of data backed up in a short amount of time!” said de Gier. “Data is very quickly restored from ExaGrid’s landing zone. We no longer need to wait for the system to read the data or create an index to restore it, which can take a long time,” he added.

ExaGrid writes backups directly to a disk 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 while providing full system resources to the backups for the shortest backup window. Available system cycles are utilized to perform deduplication and offsite replication for an optimal recovery point at the disaster recovery site. Once complete, the onsite data is protected and immediately available in its full undeduplicated form for fast restores, VM Instant Recoveries, and tape copies while the offsite data is ready for disaster recovery.

ExaGrid Support Resolves Issues Quickly

ExaGrid’s customer support offers prompt resolution to any issues that might come up in the backup environment, which de Gier experienced firsthand. “We’ve saved a lot of time managing backups thanks to the daily reports from our ExaGrid systems. It’s very easy to analyze any issues that come up. The ExaGrid support team is also quick to respond whenever I have contacted them, which I appreciate. We had an issue arise on a Friday that needed quick resolution, and my ExaGrid support engineer worked with his team to assess the situation right away. It was determined that day that we needed a replacement appliance, and we received it on Monday. With guidance from our engineer, we were up and running again that evening.”

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.

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.

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.

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 2.7PB full backup in a single system.

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