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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid Delivers Secure and Scalable Backup Storage to Company in Growth Mode

 

Grupo Número 1 is a group of companies located in the Canary Islands with diversified interests in different business sectors including retail, real estate, and related services that include insurance, HR, and legal advice within the commercial real estate sector.

Their retail business is the largest multi-franchisee in Spain. It manages nine brands and five commercial alliances in more than 150 points of sale. Grupo Número 1 currently manages 21 shopping centers throughout the Canary Islands and has distinguished itself as a leader in real estate for the management and promotion of shopping centers.

Key Benefits:

  • Grupo Número 1 enjoys peace of mind with ExaGrid’s Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery
  • ExaGrid-Veeam integration provides fast backup and restore performance
  • Comprehensive security features such as 2FA and RBAC help company meet company’s security goals
  • ExaGrid’s scalability key as Grupo Número 1 plans for continued growth
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"ExaGrid gives me peace of mind that our data is secure. Beyond that, we’re excited about the flexibility the ExaGrid system provides as our business grows. ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage will allow us to scale out to accommodate the volume of data that we will need to back up down the road. These valuable technology features are complemented with white-glove support—knowing that we have somebody that knows our systems and will know what we need right away is one of the best things about ExaGrid."

Eneko Ferrero, CIO

Company’s Evolution Signals Time to Revitalize Infrastructure

Grupo Número 1 is a family-owned business. The company has decided to revitalize its existing technology including the backup solution. “The company wants to improve our data protection and infrastructure,” said Eneko Ferrero, CIO at Grupo Número 1. “We chose ExaGrid because of the security inherent in the design of the ExaGrid system, specifically the two tiers—that is the Landing Zone and the Repository Tier.”

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, for longer-term retention. ExaGrid’s unique architecture and features provide comprehensive security including Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery (RTL), and through the combination of a non-network-facing tier (tiered air gap), a delayed delete policy, and immutable data objects, backup data is protected from being deleted or encrypted. ExaGrid’s offline tier is ready for recovery in the event of an attack.

Grupo Número 1’s infrastructure consists largely of VMs that include file servers, domain controllers, application servers, and more. Their goal is to manage their backups on ExaGrid through Veeam and VMware. They plan to migrate the legacy data center in stages onto the new version of their infrastructure and use ExaGrid as the backup solution. In the future, they plan to increase the storage capacity of the ExaGrid system.

ExaGrid-Veeam Integration Ensures Fast Backup and Restore Performance

During the evaluation process, Ferrero and his IT team worked with a solution provider partner.  Through the Proof of Concept process, they discovered that they liked the integration with Veeam in particular, and the fast restores combined with the deduplication capacity.

“The intention is that for all the line of business—retail, finance, HR, real estate—we will eventually do the backups to the ExaGrid solution, so of course, we wanted to do it with something that integrated with Veeam,” said Ferrero.

Additionally, they were impressed with ExaGrid’s fast restore performance that helped them adhere to policies around recovery time objective (RTO). “Our RTO policies are as fast as possible in some lines of business, particularly retail, because we can tell how much money we would be losing by the minute if the servers are down. We expect ExaGrid to help our business in that regard if we ever had to do a critical restore,” he said.

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).

ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover so that backups are written Veeam-to-Veeam versus Veeam-to-CIFS, which provides a 30% increase in backup performance. Since the Veeam Data Mover is not an open standard, it is far more secure than using CIFS and other open market protocols. In addition, because ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover and supports Veeam Fast Clone, performing a synthetic full takes minutes and automatic resynthesis of the synthetic fulls into actual full backups takes place in parallel with backups. Resynthesis of Veeam Fast Clone synthetic fulls into ExaGrid’s Landing Zone allows for the fastest restores and VM boots in the industry.

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.

ExaGrid Scales Out as Storage and Backup Demands Grow

Prior to migrating to ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage, the company relied on Dell Network Attached Storage (NAS). With ambitious growth goals, Ferrero knew that their legacy storage and backup solutions would not be able to scale to meet their future requirements.

“The company is going through a profound change in terms of infrastructure and adding software to support the different lines of businesses and products,” said Ferrero. “We needed an infrastructure that would be able to grow with the business and with that, security was paramount.

With ambitious growth forecasted for the company, Ferrero needed to ensure that their storage solution could scale to keep pace. “We might need to add storage in the future, and that made ExaGrid’s scale out capability – with no interruption to business operations – very attractive to us,” he said. “ExaGrid makes it easy to add a new appliance and gives us the CPU and the storage.”

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.

“ExaGrid gives me peace of mind that our data is secure. Beyond that, we’re excited about the flexibility the ExaGrid system provides as our business grows. ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage will allow us to scale out to accommodate the volume of data that we will need to back up down the road. These valuable technology features are complemented with white-glove support—knowing that we have somebody that knows our systems and will know what we need right away is one of the best things about ExaGrid.”

ExaGrid and Veeam Deliver

ExaGrid met all the company’s requirements. 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. And for a company focused on growth and security, the choice was easy.

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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