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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Indium Pairs ExaGrid with Veeam for Maximum Data Protection

Customer Overview

Indium Corporation® is a premier materials refiner, smelter, manufacturer, and supplier to the global electronics, semiconductor, thin-film, and thermal management markets. Products include solders and fluxes; brazes; thermal interface materials; sputtering targets; indium, gallium, germanium, and tin metals and inorganic compounds; and NanoFoil®. Founded in 1934, the company has global technical support and factories located in China, Germany, India, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.

Key Benefits:

  • Considerable backup window reduction from 10 hours to 2
  • Restores that used to take days now take just minutes
  • Simple architecture fits easily into existing infrastructure
  • Support for future virtualized environment
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Veeam: Product of Choice for Virtualization

During Indium’s early virtualization effort, the company was backing up its virtual machines (VMs) as if they were physical machines, but they knew there was a better way, so they began to investigate alternatives.

According to Gary Usyk, network administrator at Indium, “We looked at several alternatives, and Veeam was definitely the best product. It was easy to use and did the job. Being able to easily grab a single file out of a backup, the ability to spin up a backup VM – those types of things are definite benefits. I’ve restored full VMs back into the production environment very seamlessly.”

"I was looking for a disk-based backup solution that I didn’t have to worry about – a set-it-and-forget-it type of system. Our partner recommended ExaGrid, and we felt that it was a good fit. "

Gary Usyk, Network Administrator

NAS Insufficient to Handle Growing Storage Needs

Indium had been backing up to tape and then switched to NAS as the storage target, but as storage space dwindled and retention continued to become more and more of an issue, they decided to evaluate other disk-based backup solutions.

“We were running low on storage space while still trying to meet our retention requirements,” said Usyk. “I was looking for a disk-based backup solution that I didn’t have to worry about – a set-it-and-forget-it type of system. Our partner recommended ExaGrid, and we felt that it was a good fit.” Having recognized the need for virtualization-specific backup, Indium implemented a “best of breed” approach, with Veeam for their virtual machines and Veritas Backup Exec for their physical machines. The ExaGrid system works seamlessly with both. Using ExaGrid and Veeam, Usyk has been able to reduce backup time from ten hours down to just a couple of hours.

ExaGrid’s Deduplication and Scalability Seal the Deal

According to Usyk, deduplication was important in their consideration of ExaGrid. “We wanted to consolidate the amount of data we were storing to increase our retention, and because we try to do things as simply as possible, we thought it was a great feature that we could easily expand the system just by adding another unit.” Usyk reports that his average deduplication ratio is 7.8:1, and his SQL data deduplicates at 11.8:1.

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’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.

Simple Installation, Exemplary Customer Support

According to Usyk, installing the ExaGrid system was “a piece of cake,” and his ongoing experience with ExaGrid’s customer support team has been “fantastic.”

The ExaGrid system was designed to be easy to set up and operate. ExaGrid’s industry-leading level 2 senior support engineers are assigned to individual customers, ensuring they always work with the same engineer. Customers never have to repeat themselves to various support staff, and issues get resolved quickly.

Intelligent Data Protection

ExaGrid’s turnkey disk-based backup system combines enterprise drives with zone-level data deduplication, delivering a disk-based solution that is far more cost effective than simply backing up to disk with deduplication or using backup software deduplication to disk. ExaGrid’s patented zone-level deduplication reduces the disk space needed by a range of 10:1 to 50:1, depending on the data types and retention periods, by storing only the unique objects across backups instead of redundant data. Adaptive Deduplication performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups. As data is being deduplicated to the repository, it is also replicated to a second ExaGrid site or the public cloud for disaster recovery (DR).

ExaGrid and Veeam

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 and Veritas Backup Exec

Veritas Backup Exec provides cost-effective, high-performance backup and recovery – including continuous data protection for Microsoft Exchange servers, Microsoft SQL servers, file servers, and workstations. High-performance agents and options provide fast, flexible, granular protection and scalable management of local and remote server backups. Organizations using Veritas Backup Exec can look to ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage for nightly backups. ExaGrid sits behind existing backup applications, such as Veritas Backup Exec, providing faster and more reliable backups and restores. In a network running Veritas Backup Exec, using ExaGrid is as easy as pointing existing backup jobs at a NAS share on the ExaGrid system. Backup jobs are sent directly from the backup application to ExaGrid for backup to disk.

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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