Gifford Medical Center

Gifford Medical Center Easily Backs Up Data with Scalable ExaGrid-Veeam Solution

Customer Overview

Gifford Medical Center, a Critical Access Hospital in Randolph, Vermont, is the heart of the Gifford Health Care system. Nationally recognized for its importance in serving its rural community, it has remained a central hub of high-quality medical care in Vermont for over 110 years.

Key Benefits:

ExaGrid-Veeam solution backs up hospital’s data in short windows, ranging 5-50 minutes
ExaGrid system easily scales to accommodate Gifford Medical Center’s data growth
ExaGrid support guides hospital’s IT team on best practices of using ExaGrid and Veeam

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ExaGrid and Veeam: ‘Set It and Forget It’

Gifford Medical Center uses Veeam to back up its data to an ExaGrid system. Sheila Hopkins, the hospital’s server administrator, finds that this solution works very well in the backup environment.

“The ExaGrid-Veeam solution is reliable and very low-maintenance. The most that I need to do is quickly check the backup report each day; it’s very much a set-it-and-forget-it backup solution.”

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 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.

"The ExaGrid-Veeam solution is reliable and very low maintenance. The most that I need to do is quickly check the backup report each day; it’s very much a set-it-and-forget-it backup solution. "

Sheila Hopkins, Server Administrator

Reliable Backups in Short Windows

Gifford Medical Center has an ExaGrid system at its primary site which replicates backups to its DR site. Hopkins backs up Gifford Medical Center’s data in daily incrementals and weekly fulls. The data consists of a variety of applications, as well as SQL databases, and file servers. “Our environment is mostly virtualized, though we do have some physical servers,” said Hopkins. “It’s great that we can use Veeam to back up our 70 virtual machines (VMs) as well as our physical servers to the ExaGrid system.”

Hopkins is impressed by the short backup windows achieved with ExaGrid-Veeam solution. “Our incrementals range from 40-50 minutes for VMs and only five minutes for our physical servers,” she said. She has also found that restoring data is a very straightforward and easy process.

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).

Easily Scalable Solution

As Gifford Medical Center’s data has grown, the hospital has installed a larger ExaGrid appliance model to its primary site, and then added the smaller appliance to the DR site system. Hopkins has found that making the transition and scaling out the DR site has been easy, with the help of her ExaGrid support engineer. “Adding the appliances was very straightforward. My support engineer sent instructions on the setup, so I was up and running within 15 minutes, and then she took care of the configuration. It was so simple.”

ExaGrid’s appliance models can be mixed and matched into a single scale-out system allowing a full backup of up to 2.7PB with a combined ingest rate of 488TB/hr, in a single system. The appliances automatically join the scale-out system. Each appliance includes the appropriate amount of processor, memory, disk, and bandwidth for the data size. By adding compute with capacity, the backup window remains fixed in length as the data grows. Automatic load balancing across all repositories allows for full utilization of all appliances. Data is deduplicated into an offline repository, and additionally, data is globally deduplicated across all repositories.

ExaGrid Support Provides Guidance on System

Hopkins appreciates the guidance she receives from her assigned ExaGrid support engineer. “I’m somewhat new to using an ExaGrid system and my support engineer took time to introduce me to the solution in a training session to help me get comfortable using the system. She’s very knowledgeable and supportive and has been helpful with both ExaGrid and Veeam.”

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-Veeam Combined 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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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story