Switching to ExaGrid From Tape Eases Long-Term Retention Concerns

The IT team at Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) had been archiving the company’s data to a tape solution using Veeam. Gert Prinsloo, IDC’s infrastructure manager had concerns about the operational challenges associated with long- term retention to tape and it was decided to look into other solutions. “As a financial institute, we need to store data for up to fifteen years, and sometimes longer, for long-term retention. Writing and reading to tape, which is a mechanical device, proved to be a problem, so we opted for the ExaGrid solution,” he said.

Gert Prinsloo has been managing IDC’s infrastructure since 1997 and as technology changes and advances, it can present challenges in terms of how to maintain data stored on legacy systems, but he feels confident that ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture makes it a good long-term solution. “ExaGrid has taken away one of those challenges that organizations with older data are faced with: how do you recover from a tape that’s ten years old? Technology changes, and at the rate of technology changing right now, it refreshes every 18 months. We can’t look back,” he said. “You may think you’re fine when you have 2,000 tapes in storage, but many organizations don’t think ahead and to consider how they are going to read those tapes years later. They don’t realize the challenge they have.”

ExaGrid’s unique scale-out architecture was important to IDC’s decision to switch to ExaGrid. “One of the reasons why we chose ExaGrid is because it’s so modular. If our current ExaGrid system becomes full, I just can add another appliance and keep adding appliances, which gives us unlimited capacity for all of our long-term retention. I feel confident that this current solution will accommodate for the next ten years, at least,” said Gert.

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.

ExaGrid Provides ‘Phenomenal’ Improvement in Backup Performance

Gert backs up IDC’s data with daily incrementals and weekly fulls, which consists of 250TB worth of structured and unstructured data, such as databases, SAP, Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint applications, and more. “We back up our business-critical applications to ExaGrid and the backup performance has improved so much, I ended up showing a screenshot to a colleague because the backup window is so much shorter now,” he said. “Our backup jobs are staggered but are still finished within about four hours; it’s phenomenal!”

The backup performance with the ExaGrid is a huge improvement over backing up to tape. “I used to back up to disk, and then stage it to tape over the weekend, starting on a Friday but sometimes by the next Wednesday, I had to stop the tape backups because the job would get locked. It worked for us for many years, but the with the volume of data we have to process daily, we needed something more reliable and it’s so much better to back up to ExaGrid instead of a mechanical device. Tape has become such a last-century solution,” said Gert. “In addition, it is incredibly tedious to manage tapes due to the amount of time we had to spend changing, formatting, and fixing the tapes. ExaGrid is so simple to install and run, so we don’t need to spend time managing it.”

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).