ExaGrid Delivers Faster Backups, Scalability, and a Disaster Recovery Solution
With the ExaGrid, Ingham County has been able to reduce their backup window and increase the amount of data they back up – all with a scalable architecture that can easily grow along with their data growth. According to VanderSchaaf, “We wanted something that was going to decrease our backup window and reduce the amount of data we store, and with deduplication, we are able to get more data on the disk.”
The ExaGrid system works alongside Ingham County’s existing backup application, Arcserve. ExaGrid’s turnkey disk- based backup system combines enterprise SATA/SAS drives with zone level
data deduplication, delivering a disk-based solution that is far more cost effective than simply backing up to straight disk.
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).
Ingham County chose a 10TB ExaGrid system for on-site backups, and there is also an ExaGrid system installed at Ingham Intermediate School District (IISD), Ingham County’s collaboration partner. There is a plan to replicate data using ExaGrid’s replication capability between Ingham County and IISD, creating a cross-protected disaster recovery (DR) solution for the two sites. As Ingham County’s data grows, the ExaGrid can easily be expanded to handle additional data.
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.