Backup Window Reduced and Staff Time Recouped
In addition to installing an ExaGrid backup storage system, HS&BA migrated to a virtual environment and replaced Veritas Backup Exec with Quest vRanger software. Quest vRanger offers full image level and differential backups of virtual machines (VMs) to enable faster, more efficient storage and recovery of VMs. ExaGrid’s disk-based backup systems serve as the backup target for these VM images, using high-performance, adaptive data deduplication to dramatically reduce the disk storage capacity required for backups.
Taime describes HS&BA as a third-party administrator of health, welfare, and benefit packages, making the company a HIPAA-covered entity. HS&BA backs up its claim system processing data to its ExaGrid system. “We’re also backing up the systems that support that environment, such as Active Directory, and DNS file and print services. Switching to ExaGrid allowed us to capture more data than we had been previously, and it’s much simpler. There are certain things that we might only back up on a weekly basis because they are less critical to us, and there are others that we make sure to back up daily,” said Taime.
The IT staff saw a huge improvement with the daily backup window. “The tape backups seemed almost never-ending; our backup window had grown to 22 hours! Once we switched to ExaGrid, the backup window was reduced to 12 hours,” said Taime. In addition to reducing the backup window, Taime found that replacing tape had reduced the time needed for backup administration. “Our IT staff spends far less time managing backups now. They no longer have to deal with the manual aspects of tape like rotating media and loading cartridges, or with the transport window to move the tape offsite. It’s definitely saved a hours of staff time per week.”
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).