Secure ExaGrid System Allows Team to Sleep Better at Night

René Oogink, senior technical specialist, has been working at Gemeente Hengelo for over 14 years. Prior to ExaGrid, the municipality had used a NetApp system that was scripted to make snapshots with an advanced scheduling principle. It was designed to do the backups writing to disk, and then it was synchronized to another data center as a secondary DR location.

“We not only needed a new storage system, but I also wanted to introduce a new way of performing backups. I didn’t want to use the advanced custom scripting because it was unmanageable. I wanted to use a standard backup solution with standard hardware. I introduced the tech team to Veeam and ExaGrid. We demoed some other vendors, including IBM TSM and Commvault, but in the end, our vendor advised us to use Veeam in combination with ExaGrid. This resulted in us having the best solution currently in the market,” he said.

At the time when Gemeente Hengelo installed ExaGrid, many other municipalities had faced malicious attacks from hackers. “We wanted to find a system that could ensure our data would not be erased. ExaGrid’s Retention Time-Lock feature with immutability had just been released, so it was perfect timing. Our neighboring municipality had a big problem, but we could sleep well knowing that our data was safe and ready for recovery if needed.”

ExaGrid appliances have a network-facing disk-cache Landing Zone where the most recent backups are stored in an undeduplicated format for fast backup and restore performance. Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing tier called the Repository Tier, where recent and retention deduplicated data is stored for longer-term retention. The combination of a non-network facing tier (tiered air gap) plus delayed deletes and immutable data objects guards against the backup data being deleted or encrypted. ExaGrid’s offline tier is ready for recovery in the event of an attack.

Scale-out Architecture Allows for Easy Expansion

“We have added ExaGrid appliances over the past couple of years and currently have six appliances in our system. We love the scale-out architecture. We’re going to do offsite backup, along with our internet provider, for efficient DR.  Each data center has three ExaGrid appliances, and they communicate with one another. It’s a good feeling that we have a solid technical product in the data centers, which is supported by multiple vendors.”

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.