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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Canadian MSP Maximizes Backup Environment using ExaGrid, Passing Benefits onto its Customers

Customer Overview

Hudson Technology is a privately-held managed services provider based in Toronto, Ontario. Its talented team of experienced consultants and expert technicians have been providing clients with the highest quality in IT design and cloud storage innovations.

Key Benefits:

  • Hudson Technology switches to ExaGrid for better deduplication
  • After maximizing storage with ExaGrid, MSP offers customers longer retention at a lower cost
  • ExaGrid SEC model enhances data security for Hudson Technology and its customers
  • ExaGrid-Veeam solution provides faster backups and restores
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Business Growth Leads to New Backup Solution

Hudson Technology offers managed cloud services to its customers, and as its business grew, so did its need to find a scalable storage solution. “Initially, we backed up to data to a storage-attached network (SAN), using Veeam,” said Shawn Mears, chief technology officer and cofounder of Hudson Technology. “As our business grew, so did our data, and we realized we needed a backup solution that offered better deduplication. We ended up looking into new solutions, especially after onboarding a customer that needed a large amount of data backed up – over 50TB,” he said.

Mears noticed that ExaGrid was listed as a storage target in Veeam’s console, and decided to research more about the backup storage system. After comparing ExaGrid with other backup solutions, he decided it would work best for Hudson Technology. “ExaGrid’s Landing Zone helped it stand out from other products on the market. Its integration with Veeam was also important to us, and we’ve seen that the two work very well together.”

The ExaGrid system is easy to install and use and works seamlessly with the industry’s leading backup applications so that an organization can retain its investment in its existing backup applications and processes. In addition, ExaGrid appliances can replicate to a second ExaGrid appliance at a second site or to the public cloud for DR (disaster recovery). 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.

Better Deduplication Allows MSP to Pass Savings onto Customers

Since installing an ExaGrid system, Mears has been pleased with the enhanced data deduplication the system provides, which maximizes storage capacity. “ExaGrid’s deduplication results in cost savings on storage, allowing us to ‘right-size’ our pricing and pass the savings onto our customers. With the greater storage, we are also able to run more full backups, and feel more comfortable offering longer retention to customers,” he said.

Veeam uses changed block tracking to perform a level of data deduplication. ExaGrid allows Veeam deduplication and Veeam dedupe-friendly compression to stay on. ExaGrid will increase Veeam’s deduplication by a factor of about 7:1 to a total combined deduplication ratio of 14:1, reducing the storage required and saving on storage costs up front and over time.

"ExaGrid’s deduplication results in cost savings on storage, allowing us to ‘right-size’ our pricing and pass the savings onto our customers. With the greater storage, we are also able to run more full backups, and feel more comfortable offering longer retention to customers. "

Shawn Mears, CTO

ExaGrid’s Integration with Veeam Results in Faster Backups and Restores

Hudson Technology accommodates each customer with an SLA that fits their needs, in terms of recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO), to offer business continuity and data protection. Mears has found that incremental backups are much faster using the ExaGrid-Veeam solution, and that data can be restored very quickly from ExaGrid’s Landing Zone, using Veeam.

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, Veeam synthetic fulls can be created six times faster than any other solution. ExaGrid stores the most recent Veeam backups in an undeduplicated form in its Landing Zone and has the Veeam Data Mover running on each ExaGrid appliance and has a processor in each appliance in a scale-out architecture. This combination of Landing Zone, Veeam Data Mover, and scale-out compute provides the fastest Veeam synthetic fulls versus any other solution on the market. 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.

ExaGrid Provides Enhanced Data Security

Hudson Technology backs up 90% of its customer data, as well as its own data, to the ExaGrid-Veeam solution. The company installed ExaGrid SEC model appliances with enterprise-class Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) technology, further enhancing data security with encryption at rest. All data on the disk drive is encrypted automatically without any action required by users. Encryption and authentication keys are never accessible to outside systems where they can be stolen. Unlike software- based encryption methods, SEDs typically have a better throughput rate, particularly during extensive read operations.

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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