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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid Improves Performance, Maximizes Storage Capacity, and Adds Security to Intex’s Backups

 

Intex Recreation Corp. has more than 50 years of experience in recreation. They have a long history of delivering the highest quality products—including above ground pools, spas, airbeds, toys, furniture, boats and more—at affordable prices.

As part of a worldwide family of companies, Intex strives to meet elevated standards for quality, safety, and value while focusing on its commitment to decrease the company’s carbon footprint and lessen the amount of fossil fuels used in business operations.

Key Benefits:

  • Intex gains improved backup performance
  • ExaGrid security features fulfill cybersecurity insurance requirements
  • ExaGrid-Veeam combined dedupe maximizes storage capacity to keep up with data growth
  • ExaGrid is reliable and easy to use, giving Intex’s IT team peace of mind
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ExaGrid Meets Growing Data Storage Demands

Intex Recreation Corp. is in the business of fun, but Joey Garcia, IT Manager at the company, takes data protection seriously.  Before ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage was implemented, Intex was backing its data up with Veeam to direct-attached storage (DAS) from Dell.  When the IT team needed a larger solution for its growing data, Garcia considered Dell Data Domain, but found it wasn’t the right fit for Intex’s backup environment. “Data Domain seemed too complicated and very expensive, so we talked to our IT provider, and they suggested that we look at ExaGrid.” Garcia also noted that they found the price point to be attractive based on all the features and compared to other vendors. “We also saw a lot of positive feedback about ExaGrid online and we value the reviews of other customers,” he said.

Several factors weighed into the decision to make the move to ExaGrid. “We were outgrowing our direct-attached storage from Dell, so we looked at ExaGrid. ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage gives us the capacity we need as our requirements grow—it nearly doubled our existing storage space, and offered impressive deduplication. Additionally, ExaGrid offers a lot of things that we were looking for in a backup solution as far as security—like encrypted backups, comprehensive security, and the ability to recover from ransomware attacks.”

ExaGrid invites organizations to pilot test its Tiered Backup Storage before buying. “The ability for us to try it, test it in our environment, see how it runs, and see the performance was helpful. Once we saw that ExaGrid was fast and easy to set up, and since we had migrated all of the same backup jobs that we had on our old backup storage, it was easy to make the decision to buy it” said Garcia.

"We were outgrowing our direct-attached storage from Dell, so we looked at ExaGrid. ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage gives us the capacity we need as our requirements grow—it nearly doubled our existing storage space, and offered impressive deduplication. Additionally, ExaGrid offers a lot of things that we were looking for in a backup solution as far as security—like encrypted backups, comprehensive security, and the ability to recover from ransomware attacks."

Joey Garcia, IT Manager

Easy Installation with ExaGrid Support

“ExaGrid made implementation simple” said Garcia. “Our ExaGrid support engineer walked us through the configuration of the interface and securing it, and setting up multifactor authentication—so it was easy. We have peace of mind, knowing that it’s there, doing its job and performing well.”

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.

Intex Sees Major Improvements in Backup Performance with ExaGrid

“The backup performance is a lot better than I expected. I admit I was skeptical at first, but it’s very good” said Garcia.  He said that backups are completing within the desired window and that he’s seen a vast improvement from the days of tape and DAS. “When we were using tape backups, that was horrible. That was why we switched to DAS from Dell, and it got better. Then with ExaGrid, it improved even more and just got quicker and quicker.”

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 Security Features Fulfill Cybersecurity Insurance Requirements

During the evaluation process for a new backup storage solution, Garcia said security played a big role and that was one of the reasons why they looked at ExaGrid. “Our cybersecurity insurance carrier asked if we air gap our backups. ExaGrid has an air gap between its two tiers, and the Repository Tier is not connected to a network, so attackers can’t access that. It was important to us to be able to check that box that our backup solution has an air gap.”

ExaGrid appliances have a network-facing disk-cache Landing Zone where the most recent backups are stored in an un-deduplicated format for fast backup and restore performance. Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing tier called the Repository Tier, for longer-term retention. ExaGrid’s unique architecture and features provide comprehensive security including Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery (RTL), and through the combination of a non-network-facing tier (tiered air gap), a delayed delete policy, and immutable data objects, backup data is protected from being deleted or encrypted. ExaGrid’s offline tier is ready for recovery in the event of an attack.

Combined ExaGrid-Veeam Dedupe Keeps Up with Data Growth

Intex operates a mostly virtualized environment using Veeam with ExaGrid and the IT team finds the integration between the products to be seamless. “There’s an integration in Veeam that already talks to ExaGrid, so it makes things simpler. Depending on how you want to segregate your backups, you just configure that on Veeam. It’s nice that it’s already directly integrated,” said Garcia.

Deduplication was important to Garcia when he was evaluating solutions. Intex’s IT department backs up the entire VM, and those VMs can consist of file servers, databases, application servers, and Active Directory servers. Depending on the type of data, Garcia said that the frequency of backups and length of retention that is kept can vary. “It depends on how long I really need to keep the data. I keep the data on the file servers longer and backs those up on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, while databases are backed up daily and weekly and kept for two weeks. Data accumulates and there’s not much deletion; it just gets bigger.” Despite the growth of the data, he said that with ExaGrid, he is now able to back up everything.

Garcia credits deduplication with making the storage easier to manage and keeping up with data growth, and said that the combination of ExaGrid and Veeam are helping the company achieve deduplication ratios of 12:1.

Veeam uses changed block tracking to perform a level of data deduplication. ExaGrid allows Veeam deduplication and Veeam dedupe-friendly compression to stay on. ExaGrid can increase Veeam’s deduplication by a factor of about 7:1 up to a total combined deduplication ratio of 14:1, reducing the storage required and saving on storage costs up front and over time.

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.

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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