Long, Problematic Backups Led to Search for a New Solution

Horizon Food Group used PHD Virtual data backup with Veritas Backup Exec to external hard drives for years. Because Horizon was completely virtualized, drives had to be manually swapped every day to ensure backup copies were in sync. At that time, there were three people on Horizon’s IT staff. Today, network and system administration, and website and SharePoint administration are outsourced to two consulting companies, leaving one full-time position on the company’s IT staff.

“We were having trouble – it grew to the point where we were having issues getting our backups done in a day. Backups would start and they’d still be running throughout the next day – taking between 20 and 22 hours to complete. It was horrible,” said Roger Beard, Director of Information Systems for Horizon Food Group.

Horizon realized it was time to become efficient with backup storage, so three and a half years ago Beard began searching for a disk-based appliance. Horizon now backs up 30TB+ of data via an ExaGrid and off-site solution.

“I chose ExaGrid, and at the same time we went with Veeam. One thing I really love is that Veeam and ExaGrid are not static. It was good before and it’s even better now, and they keep adding features and better integration. Both companies are very forward-thinking and progressive. I love the integration and continued development.

My backups continue to get faster and more efficient. I also have a Veeam backup repository that’s offsite for my DR plan,” stated Beard. Recently, the ExaGrid team reached out to Horizon about a new Veeam integration feature and it proved to decrease backup by another 10-20%. “Boy, was my ExaGrid support engineer right! Our backups are finishing noticeably faster, and our off-sites are too! We stagger our backups now to the ExaGrid; we start at 5:45 p.m. with our last backup starting at 7:45 p.m., and everything is typically done by 8:30 p.m.,” said Beard.

ExaGrid and Veeam

“ExaGrid knows Veeam software, and Veeam knows ExaGrid hardware. The initial setup was very smooth. Both companies knew what they were doing and what they were talking about, and I think that made all the difference. Both companies made it really simple. We were set up and working in a couple of hours,” said Beard.

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.

Unique Architecture

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.