Jordan's Furniture

Jordan’s Furniture Chooses Veeam and ExaGrid over EMC for Faster, More Efficient Backups and Recoveries

Customer Overview

Jordan’s Furniture is a New England-based furniture retailer with seven locations in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Jordan’s is a leader in combining entertainment and shopping, with each store offering a unique experience including IMAX 3D Theatres, Liquid Fireworks, Motion Odyssey Movie (MOM) rides, and full-service restaurants.

Key Benefits:

Tight Veeam-ExaGrid integration means that Jordan’s can do synthetic fulls every night
Veeam provides a “set-itand forget-it” experience that is very easy to use and administer
Veeam’s Instant VM Recovery has enabled Jordan’s to thin out its environment
ExaGrid’s customer support delivers “consistently high” level of service to Jordan’s
“Painless” scalability has enabled Jordan’s to easily expand its system to handle more data

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Need to Efficiently Back Up Virtualized Environment Led to Selection of Veeam and ExaGrid

Jordan’s Furniture had virtualized the majority of its infrastructure over the past several years and, like many companies, was experiencing significant data growth. The retailer had been backing up its virtual infrastructure data using an EMC Avamar system, but ongoing capacity issues and the need for better disaster recovery led the company to look for a new solution designed specifically for virtualized environments.

Jordan’s had been using ExaGrid to back up its physical servers running Solaris and, after looking again at EMC Avamar and Dell EMC Data Domain, decided to expand its use of the ExaGrid system and also purchase Veeam® Backup & Replication™ to back up its virtual infrastructure. Today, the retailer is using Veeam for its virtual infrastructure and ExaGrid for its entire backup environment.

“We liked that Veeam and ExaGrid are tightly integrated. We chose Veeam because it was built for virtualized environments, enables extremely fast recoveries, and automates many of the tasks associated with deploying new VM backups. We had some experience with the ExaGrid system here in our environment and were impressed with its ability to quickly and efficiently replicate information between datacenters,” said Ethan Peterson, network engineer at Jordan’s Furniture.

“The ExaGrid system was far more cost effective than the EMC offerings, and we liked its scalability and ease of use.”

"The combination of Veeam and ExaGrid is very powerful, it’s cost-effective, and was designed specifically for the unique challenges of backing up virtualized environments. We’ve been extremely pleased with the solution. "

Ethan Peterson, Network Engineer

Veeam-ExaGrid Combination Delivers Fast Backups and Recoveries

Peterson said that Jordan’s chose Veeam for the company’s virtual environment because it offers a “set-it-and-forget-it” experience that makes the solution easy to administer and also speeds backup and recovery times. “Veeam and ExaGrid work together extremely well and deliver features designed specifically for virtualized environments, like a data mover that helps to make backups and recoveries faster and more efficient,” said Peterson. “It’s a very well-integrated solution, and we’re able to do synthetic full backups every night so backup times are minimized.”

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. In addition, because ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover, Veeam synthetic fulls can be created six times faster than any other solution. 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.

Two-site ExaGrid System Delivers Cost-effective Disaster Recovery

Jordan’s Furniture now backs up data from its stores, distribution center, and headquarters to an ExaGrid system in its main data center and replicates it to a second system installed in a colocation center for disaster recovery. “Deploying a two-site ExaGrid system was more cost effective than the competing Dell EMC products because we would have incurred additional licensing expenses,” Peterson said. That’s not the case with the ExaGrid system.

Instant Recovery Provides Added Security

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).

“Instant VM Recovery was a big selling point for us, and it’s enabled us to thin out our environment,” said Peterson. “In the past, we’d upgrade a server and leave the VM around in the event that we needed to restore it. Now, we’re confident that we can quickly recover a VM from a backup at any point in time. It gives us extra security in the event that we delete something and need to get it back. We can recover a file from the ExaGrid system in a quarter of the time it took using EMC Avamar.”

Simple, Easy-to-Maintain Environment

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.

“The ExaGrid system is far easier to maintain than our EMC Avamar solution, and it’s supported by a great customer support team,” Peterson said. “Companies often tout superior support, but you really don’t know what you’re getting until you need an answer on something. Our ExaGrid support engineer has been terrific from the start and has delivered a consistently high level of service to us.”

Scalability to Grow

The ExaGrid system can easily scale to accommodate data growth. ExaGrid’s software makes the system highly scalable – appliances of any size or age can be mixed and matched in a single system. A single scale-out system can take in up to a 2.7PB full backup plus retention at an ingest rate of up to 488TB per hour.

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.

“Because ExaGrid was so cost effective, we were able to purchase a system that was a lot bigger than we need today for our virtual infrastructure. However, we recently expanded our ExaGrid system to handle more capacity and we also added a system for disaster recovery. The process was painless,” said Peterson.

Veeam and ExaGrid Provide Superior Solution

Peterson said he would recommend the ExaGrid system to other organizations seeking a backup solution for virtual environments. “The combination of Veeam and ExaGrid is very powerful, it’s cost-effective, and was designed specifically for the unique challenges of backing up virtualized environments. We’ve been extremely pleased with the solution.” 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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