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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ipack Chooses ExaGrid for Superior Backup Performance and Comprehensive Security

Customer Overview

ipack is the first privately owned producer of aseptic packaging material in the Gulf region. ipack was born as a result of the high market demand for aseptic packaging in the region.

Headquartered in Abu Dhabi, ipack strives to provide aseptic packaging that meets international standards to customers across the Middle East, North Africa, and other markets. Using only the highest quality raw material, ipack is on a never-ending journey to be the provider of excellent packaging solutions.

Key Benefits:

  • ExaGrid offers seamless integration with Veeam and better performance than other vendors
  • ExaGrid’s comprehensive security fits in ipack’s zero trust policy
  • “Excellent” customer support from ExaGrid level 2 senior support engineer
  • ExaGrid’s RTL ensures ipack’s data can be recovered in case of a ransomware attack
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"We identified the need to look for an appliance-based solution with strong cyber security features. We did a POC with HPE StoreOnce, Dell Data Domain, and ExaGrid all at the same time. We liked the technological advantages ExaGrid had to offer. When comparing backups, restores, and deduplication ratios – ExaGrid was faster and more efficient."

Darpan Chandelkar, Senior IT Officer

POC Shows that ExaGrid Offers Faster Performance and Stronger Security than Other Vendors

Darpan Chandelkar, ipack’s senior IT officer, is responsible for backup storage and security networking. The company has been backing up its primary data on SAN storage. “We identified the need to look for an appliance-based solution with strong cyber security features. We did a POC with HPE StoreOnce, Dell Data Domain, and ExaGrid all at the same time. We liked the technological advantages ExaGrid had to offer. When comparing backups, restores, and deduplication ratios – ExaGrid was faster and more efficient than Dell Data Domain on all counts.  In addition, we had been using Veeam for years, and we liked ExaGrid’s integration with the Veeam Data Mover,” said Chandelkar.

The ExaGrid system is easy to install and use and works seamlessly with the industry’s leading backup applications so that an organization can retain its investment in its existing backup applications and processes.

ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover so that backups are written Veeam-to-Veeam versus Veeam-to-CIFS, which provides a 30% increase in backup performance. Since the Veeam Data Mover is not an open standard, it is far more secure than using CIFS and other open market protocols. ExaGrid stores the most recent Veeam backups in an undeduplicated form in its Landing Zone and has the Veeam Data Mover running on each ExaGrid appliance and has a processor in each appliance in a scale-out architecture. This combination of Landing Zone, Veeam Data Mover, and scale-out compute provides the fastest Veeam synthetic fulls versus any other solution on the market.

ExaGrid’s Comprehensive Security Leads to Greater Confidence in Data Protection

One key factor in ipack’s decision to choose ExaGrid for its backup storage solution was ExaGrid’s comprehensive security features, including ExaGrid’s Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery (RTL) feature.

“What we like about Retention Time-Lock is that there isn’t only one user who is able to adjust the settings as it takes another user, the security officer, who has to approve any changes, which works for us as we are moving towards a no-trust policy.  Our security officer is another person who knows about the architecture and understands security concerns. Using multifactor authentication to make changes to the Retention Time-Lock policy is also another win, in terms of security,” he said. “With ExaGrid, I am free from worry because we know in any situation, we can simply go to the Repository Tier, and we are sure that the backup will be restored.”

ExaGrid appliances have a network-facing disk-cache Landing Zone where the most recent backups are stored in an undeduplicated 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 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.

Hourly and Daily Backups Protect Critical Data

ipack’s has a wide variety of data types to back up, such as file shares, operating systems, CRM and MES system applications for production, as well as endpoints, which are critical for running their operations. Chandelkar backs up ipack’s data on a daily basis, and as often as every four hours for its most critical data, keeping a one month’s worth of retention to be able to restore from.

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).

Unique Architecture Makes it Easy to Scale-Out

Chandelkar found that adding a new appliance to the existing ExaGrid system was a quick and easy process. “We recently received another ExaGrid appliance. It was easy to install and migrate the share from the existing appliance to the new appliance. In two hours, we migrated and scanned the database, and all the backup jobs were up and running,” he said.

ExaGrid appliances contain not just disk but also processing power, memory, and bandwidth. When the system needs to expand, additional appliances are simply added to the existing system. The system scales linearly, maintaining a fixed-length backup window as data grows so customers only pay for what they need, when they need it.

Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing repository tier with automatic load balancing and global deduplication across all repositories.

“Excellent” Support from ExaGrid

Chandelkar appreciates ExaGrid’s customer support model. “The support is excellent! The main difference between ExaGrid and other vendors is that we have a dedicated ExaGrid support engineer who’s like a friend to us. He’s part of our team. We don’t have this kind of experience with any other vendors, wherein, you must phone the call center, book a call, and then sit there and wait. Our ExaGrid support engineer knows our infrastructure, company architecture, and our history – so he can quickly provide solutions and offer recommendations,” he said.

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.

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 2.7PB full backup in a single system.

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