75% Shorter Backup Window and Quick Data Restores
Reed manages different backup schedules for different types of data, and is pleased that he has been able to increase the frequency of some backups since switching to the new solution, and with the increased speed of the backup jobs. “Since switching to our ExaGrid-Veeam solution, we’ve been able to increase the number of synthetic fulls that we do,” he said. “Our backups used to run all night, but now the backup window has been reduced by 75%, so it’s down to two hours. The replication from one ExaGrid system to another has been great, as we don’t have to offload that process to Veeam or anything else, which would consume additional resources from the environment.”
Reed has found that the new solution has had a “big impact” in terms of how quickly data can be restored. “When we were using tape, if we needed to restore something, we’d have to order the tape back from offsite storage at Iron Mountain. It could take hours to days before we were able to restore data.
Now, not only can we easily search Veeam to find the files or servers that need to be restored, the speed that data is restored from the ExaGrid system has been phenomenal. For instance, restoring a full VM has gone from hours to minutes, depending on its size. It’s definitely made our internal customers happier that we’re able to restore the data they need in minutes instead of a full day, which helps keep the business running. Not only that, but it takes less staff time on our end that would have spent on restoring data, so we have more time for our other tasks.”
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.