Short Backup Windows and Quick Restores
Zavala backs up Jel Sert’s data in daily incrementals and weekly fulls. “Before ExaGrid, we had to rotate tapes every day, and now we’ve moved away from tape during the week. We back up in daily incrementals to the ExaGrid system Monday through Thursday, with full backups on Friday and Saturday. On Fridays, we also run a second full backup job to tape.”
Zavala appreciates ExaGrid’s “adaptive” approach to data deduplication, which performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups. “I like that our onsite ExaGrid system does everything in the background and then sends our backups to the offsite ExaGrid system. All that behind-the-scenes activity is great!” The company’s daily incrementals take 20 minutes and full backups take about two
hours and are replicated to the DR site. Zavala also finds that restoring data is also a quick process from ExaGrid’s landing zone. “We can restore a file in less than a minute. It doesn’t take long to restore a server either – it ranges from ten minutes to an hour depending on its size.”
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 and Veeam can instantly recover a file or VMware virtual machine by running it directly from the ExaGrid appliance in the event that the file is lost, corrupted or encrypted or the primary storage VM becomes unavailable. This instant recovery is possible because of ExaGrid’s Landing Zone – a high-speed disk cache on the ExaGrid appliance that retains the most recent backups in their complete form. Once the primary storage environment has been brought back to a working state, the VM backed up on the ExaGrid appliance can then be migrated to primary storage for continued operation.