Critical Data in Minutes and Restores Data in Seconds
Garon Ashby, system administrator II at the Village, backs up critical servers in daily incrementals and weekly fulls, adding the non- critical servers to the weekly backup schedule. The data mostly consists of file servers, Microsoft Exchange servers, SQL servers, and domain controllers. “The daily incrementals are fast, taking just 15 minutes at most,” said Ashby. “The full backups are pretty quick too, between two to three hours depending on the server. Ever since we established a 10GbE connection to our ExaGrid system, backup jobs are much faster now.”
Ashby has also noticed that restoring data from ExaGrid’s landing zone is faster as well. “Restoring a file from ExaGrid takes a matter of seconds; it wasn’t a very long process when we restored a file from disk – it took five minutes – but using Veeam to restore from ExaGrid offers much better speed and reliability.”
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.