ExaGrid Purchased for Scale-out Architecture, Adaptive Deduplication

“We decided to purchase the ExaGrid system because its scalability and backup approach were superior to the Data Domain unit,” Lively said. “ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture enables us to expand the system as needed by plugging additional units into a single system and its postprocess data deduplication method delivers faster restores because we can access data immediately from the landing zone.”

Grow Financial initially installed a single ExaGrid system in its Tampa headquarters and then expanded the system to include a unit in its disaster recovery site in Jacksonville. The systems have been scaled up to handle more backup data, and the credit union now has a total of three units in Tampa and three in Jacksonville. The ExaGrid system work along with Veeam and Dell Networker to back up the credit union’s servers and nearly 1,000 workstations.

“Scalability was a big concern when we began looking for a new backup solution. The Data Domain unit would have required a forklift upgrade to expand, but ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture enables us to simply add additional units to improve capacity and performance,” Lively said.

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.

Easy Administration, Superior Customer Support

Lively said that he finds the ExaGrid system reliable and easy to use. “The ExaGrid system is simple and straightforward, and there’s a very small learning curve,” he said. “The system itself is really stable and it runs extremely well, but if I do have a question or concern, I know I can count on our ExaGrid support engineer. We’ve been very impressed with our support engineer, and we have a high degree of confidence in his knowledge and experience.”

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).

“I spend far less time managing the ExaGrid than I spent managing our Data Domain unit, and because of that, I can dedicate more of my energy to things like spotting trends or thinking about ways I can improve the efficiency of our backups,” Lively said. “Installing the ExaGrid has given me peace of mind because I know that we can perform recoveries faster and if we need to expand the system, it’s as easy as ordering another appliance and plugging it in.”