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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid System was the “Right Choice” for Glens Falls Hospital

Customer Overview

Located in New York, Glens Falls Hospital operates 29 regional health care facilities and health centers in addition to its main acute care hospital campus. Its service area stretches across six primarily rural counties and 3,300 square miles. The not-for-profit hospital has more than 225 affiliated physicians, ranging from primary care practitioners to surgical subspecialists. Physicians are board certified in more than 25 specialties. On July 1, 2020, Glens Falls Hospital became an affiliate of the Albany Med Health System which includes Albany Medical Center, Columbia Memorial Hospital, Glens Falls Hospital, and Saratoga Hospital.

Key Benefits:

  • Works seamlessly with Commvault
  • Installing and subsequent upgrading of the system ‘couldn’t be easier’
  • Easy-to-understand interface
  • Centralized monitoring
  • ‘Incredible’ customer support
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Lack of Capacity, Expensive Upgrade Led to Replacement of Outdated Solution

Glens Falls Hospital purchased the ExaGrid system to replace an old disk backup solution that had reached capacity.

“We ran out of space on our old solution when our data grew suddenly. When we realized the cost and complexity of expanding the existing unit, we placed a call to our reseller who recommended that we transition to the ExaGrid system,” said Jim Goodwin, technical specialist at Glens Falls Hospital. “We were impressed with ExaGrid’s scalability and its ability to work seamlessly with our existing backup application, Commvault. We also liked its data deduplication approach because we felt it would deliver fast, efficient backups along with superior data reduction.”

The hospital initially purchased a single ExaGrid appliance but has since expanded it and now has a total of five units. The system backs up a wide range of data, including financial and business applications as well as patient information.

"The ExaGrid system is one of the easiest solutions to manage in our entire datacenter. The interface is simple to understand, and it gives me all the information I need to monitor the system in one central location. "

Jim Goodwin, Technical Specialist

Post-Process Data Deduplication Delivers Efficient Data Reduction, Speeds Restores

In total, Glens Falls Hospital now stores over 400TB of data in 34TB of disk space on the ExaGrid system. Data deduplication ratios vary due to the type of data backed up, but Goodwin reports dedupe ratios as high as 70:1 and an average ratio of 12:1. The hospital’s finance system, GE Centricity, is backed up by a single server. The finance system alone has a total backup of 21TB, which dedupes down to 355GB – a 66:1 dedupe ratio.

“ExaGrid’s data deduplication technology does a great job at reducing our data. Its post-process deduplication method is extremely efficient and because it backs data up to a landing zone, we get terrific restore performance, too. We can restore files from the ExaGrid system in minutes,” Goodwin said.

ExaGrid’s turnkey disk-based backup system combines enterprise drives with zone-level data deduplication, delivering a disk-based solution that is far more cost effective than simply backing up to disk with deduplication or using backup software deduplication to disk. ExaGrid’s patented zone-level deduplication reduces the disk space needed by a range of 10:1 to 50:1, depending on the data types and retention periods, by storing only the unique objects across backups instead of redundant data. Adaptive Deduplication performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups. As data is being deduplicated to the repository, it is also replicated to a second ExaGrid site or the public cloud for disaster recovery (DR).

Scale-out Architecture Makes Adding Capacity Easy

“Installing and upgrading the system really couldn’t be easier,” said Goodwin. “I racked the system up and then called into our ExaGrid support engineer, and he finished the configuration. Then, I created a share and add it to Commvault. All in all, my portion took about ten minutes.”

ExaGrid’s award-winning scale-out architecture provides customers with a fixed-length backup window regardless of data growth. Its unique disk-cache Landing Zone allows for the fastest backups and retains the most recent backup in its full undeduplicated form, enabling the fastest restores.

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. This combination of capabilities in a turnkey appliance makes the ExaGrid system easy to install, manage, and scale. ExaGrid’s architecture provides lifetime value and investment protection that no other architecture can match.

Streamlined Management Interface, Solid Hardware Platform, Top-notch Customer Support

Goodwin said that managing the ExaGrid system is simple and straightforward thanks to its intuitive interface and assigned customer support engineer.

“The ExaGrid system is one of the easiest solutions to manage in our entire datacenter. The interface is simple to understand, and it gives me all the information I need to monitor the system in one central location,” 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.

“The ExaGrid has been a very solid system, and it’s built with quality hardware. With our old solution, it seemed as though we were replacing hard drives every three or four months. We’ve had the ExaGrid system up and running for several years now, and we’ve only had to replace a hard drive and a cache battery,” said Goodwin. “Also, customer support has been fabulous. I love having an assigned support engineer who knows me and knows our installation. If I have a question or concern, I just email him and ten minutes later he jumps on a Webex to investigate the issue.” Goodwin said that installing the ExaGrid system was the right choice for the hospital’s environment. “The ExaGrid system slid right into our existing infrastructure and immediately delivered the scalability, performance, data deduplication, and ease of use we needed,” he said. “It’s a quality solution backed by incredible customer support, and we’ve been extremely pleased with the product.”

ExaGrid and Commvault

The Commvault backup application has a level of data deduplication. ExaGrid can ingest Commvault deduplicated data and increase the level of data deduplication by 3X providing a combined deduplication ratio of 15;1, significantly reducing the amount and cost of storage up front and over time. Instead of performing data at rest encryption in Commvault ExaGrid, performs this function in the disk drives in nanoseconds. This approach provides an increase of 20% to 30% for Commvault environments while greatly reducing storage costs.

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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