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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Ingham County Achieves Faster Backups via ExaGrid’s Disk-Based Backup with Deduplication System

Customer Overview

Ingham County is the seventh largest county in the State of Michigan and the home of Michigan’s capital, Lansing. The Ingham County Management of Information Services (MIS) Department located in Mason, Michigan is responsible for the day-to-day operation of Ingham County’s Computer Center and telephone PBX switches. They provide support for 1,100 users over 21 different departments located in five major campuses dispersed throughout the county. Along with individual computers, Ingham County MIS supports 41 servers and 1,300 phones.

Key Benefits:

  • Ingham County chooses ExaGrid to add data deduplication to its backup environment.
  • ExaGrid’s scalable architecture will accommodate Ingham’s data growth
  • Ingham County able to cross-replicate data with school district using ExaGrid, adding disaster recovery to environment
  • Ingham’s IT staff feels confident in backup solution, especially with proactive ExaGrid support
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Faster Backups Needed to Manage Growing Amounts of Data

Prior to implementing the ExaGrid system, Ingham County was backing up its data to tape, but rapid data growth was making tape backups more difficult to manage. “The amount of data we have on our network that we need to protect has been exploding,” said Jeff VanderSchaaf, senior network engineer for Ingham County. “Every time we turn around, we have to add another terabyte here or another 100 gigabytes there, so we’re wrestling with getting everything backed up in a timely manner.”

VanderSchaaf researched several alternatives to improve Ingham County’s backup situation, looking at deduplication in particular. “Our backups were taking us well into Monday production hours, so I knew I had to do something,” said VanderSchaaf. “We needed to speed things up, and ExaGrid fit the bill.”

"Our backups were taking us well into Monday production hours, so I knew I had to do something. We needed to speed things up, and ExaGrid fit the bill. "

Jeff VanderSchaaf, Senior Network Engineer

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.

Easy to Install, Outstanding Customer Support

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.

“It was simple to set up,” said VanderSchaaf, “I didn’t even have to call tech support. I read the manual briefly, which was just a couple of pages, jumped through it, and I had it up and running in 30 to 45 minutes. It was that straightforward.”

All ExaGrid components are fully supported by ExaGrid’s trained, in-house engineers dedicated to proactively managing individual accounts. “Support has been excellent,” said VanderSchaaf. “I don’t usually have vendors calling me proactively – that’s a first.”

ExaGrid and Arcserve Backup

Efficient backup requires close integration between the backup software and backup storage. That is the advantage delivered by the partnership between Arcserve and ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage. Together, Arcserve and ExaGrid provide a cost-effective backup solution that scales to meet the needs of demanding enterprise environments.

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 2.7PB full backup in a single system.

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