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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

John Knox Village Selects ExaGrid-Veeam for Fast Backups, Restores, and Replication

Customer Overview

John Knox Village is widely recognized as one of the most comprehensive not-for-profit retirement communities in the country. It provides independent living, numerous services and amenities, and a full continuum of long-term health care services on its 400+ acre campus in Lee’s Summit, Missouri.

Key Benefits:

  • IT staff restore data from ExaGrid’s landing zone in seconds
  • ExaGrid support engineer offers expertise on backup application and entire environment
  • ‘Reliable’ ExaGrid-Veeam solution saves IT staff time on backup management
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ExaGrid-Veeam Solution for Virtualized Environment

John Knox Village had historically backed up its data to disk using Veritas Backup Exec. When the Village virtualized its environment, it switched its backup application to Veeam, installing an ExaGrid system as its new backup target. The Village also installed an ExaGrid system at its disaster recovery (DR) site to establish replication between the sites, further protecting its data.

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. In addition, ExaGrid appliances can replicate to a second ExaGrid appliance at a second site or to the public cloud for DR (disaster recovery).

"ExaGrid provides reliable, speedy backups and that has made my job much easier. I don’t need to spend as much time managing backup, especially compared with solutions I’ve used in the past. "

Garon Ashby, System Administrator II

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.

Reliable Backups with Expert Support

Ashby appreciates that ExaGrid support offers expertise on his entire environment. “The ExaGrid team has been very knowledgeable and easy to work with. My support engineer helped me work through a bug in Veeam that was deleting our backups. We were able to save the deleted data by restoring it from our DR site.

“ExaGrid provides reliable, speedy backups and that has made my job much easier. I don’t need to spend as much time managing backup, especially compared with solutions I’ve used in the past,” said Ashby.

The ExaGrid system was designed to be easy to set up and maintain, and ExaGrid’s industry-leading customer support team is staffed by trained, in-house engineers who are assigned to individual accounts. The system is fully supported and was designed and manufactured for maximum uptime with redundant, hot swappable components.

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.

ExaGrid-Veeam Combined Dedupe

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 will increase Veeam’s deduplication by a factor of about 7:1 to a total combined deduplication ratio of 14:1, reducing the storage required and saving on storage costs up front and over time.

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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