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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Evidence Convinces Kern County Sheriff's Office to Implement ExaGrid's Disk-Based Backup with Data Deduplication

Customer Overview

Formed in 1866, the Kern County Sheriff’s Office is the oldest law enforcement agency in the county. The Sheriff is an elected official who serves as the county’s chief law enforcement officer as well as the county Coroner. In addition to providing police services to the unincorporated portions of the county, the Sheriff has the responsibility for the jail system, providing bailiff and prisoner transportation service to the courts, search and rescue, coroner services, and civil process. The Sheriff’s Office is comprised of over 2,400 employees consisting of deputy sheriffs, detectives, court personnel, special investigations units, detention deputies, and professional support staff. The Sheriff’s IT Department is responsible for approximately 1,200 users and 400 mobile units county-wide.

Key Benefits:

  • Dedupe Ratios as high as 30:1
  • Reliable DR solution now in place
  • IT resources are freed up due to less time managing system
  • Knowledgeable and proactive support
  • Fast restores in minutes
  • Seamless integration with Veritas Backup Exec
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Disk-Based Backup with Data Deduplication Investigated as Part of Upgraded Disaster Recovery Plan

The Kern County Sheriff’s Office is in the process of updating its disaster recovery plan. As part of its due diligence and evaluation of plans and processes, the Sheriff’s Office began to consider switching from its existing tape backup library to something more dependable. They looked at disk-based solutions and liked the added plus of data deduplication, which would maximize their disk space and therefore their budget.

The Sheriff’s Office backs up a variety of data, including home directories, the property system, the document imaging system, information and data from the Coroner’s Office, the Blackberry server and more. Their primary data currently totals approximately 1.9TB.

“I’m in the process of upgrading our disaster recovery plan,” said Steven Schaeffer, Information Specialist at the Kern County Sheriff’s Office. “Newer and more reliable technology is certainly a natural part of a good DR plan, especially to ensure that you can retain backups for the required amount of time as well as reliably recover from a disaster in the event one was to occur.”

When the Sheriff’s Office evaluated its options, they were impressed with the data deduplication feature. They chose ExaGrid in part because the system works seamlessly with their existing backup application, Veritas Backup Exec. It was important for them to choose a solution that worked seamlessly with Backup Exec since it was a product they already knew. Other solutions required a whole new backup method and interface, and the Sheriff’s Office wanted to remain with what they had.

"We recently lost our document imaging server. Using the ExaGrid, it took just 35 minutes to do a complete restore of the data. It would have taken much longer with tape, providing none of the tapes had errors on them! "

Steven Schaeffer, Information Specialist III

Backup Window Reduced, Dedupe Ratios as High as 30:1, Quick Restores

Since moving its backups to the ExaGrid, the IT team at the Sheriff’s Office is pleased that backups take much less time than when they were backing up to tape. They can feel confident that backups will be completed within their backup window, and the post- process deduplication makes backups much faster than in-line dedupe. “We have seen deduplication ratios as high as 30:1, but on average they’re about 16:1,” said Schaeffer.

After installing the ExaGrid, the Sheriff’s Office is planning to increase some retention rates and keep certain data for a longer period of time than they could when using tape backup. “We recently lost our document imaging server,” commented Schaeffer. “Using the ExaGrid, it took just 35 minutes to do a complete restore of the data. It would have taken much longer with tape, providing none of the tapes had errors on them!”

ExaGrid Saves Time, Frees up IT Resources

According to Schaeffer, not only are backups done faster with the ExaGrid, he spends much less time on them also. “The speed has picked up, and I’m not spending nearly as much time managing the system.” 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).

Quick and Simple Installation, Terrific Customer Support

The IT staff at the Sheriff’s Office found the installation to be very simple and were able to configure it very quickly. Schaeffer was pleased with the support he received from ExaGrid’s installation team. “We’ve had a few things come up that we’ve needed help with, and the customer support team helped us out a great deal,” said Schaeffer.

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).

Quick and Simple Installation, Terrific Customer Support

The IT staff at the Sheriff’s Office found the installation to be very simple and were able to configure it very quickly. Schaeffer was pleased with the support he received from ExaGrid’s installation team. “We’ve had a few things come up that we’ve needed help with, and the customer support team helped us out a great deal,” said Schaeffer.

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 and Veritas Backup Exec

Veritas Backup Exec provides cost-effective, high-performance backup and recovery – including continuous data protection for Microsoft Exchange servers, Microsoft SQL servers, file servers, and workstations. High-performance agents and options provide fast, flexible, granular protection and scalable management of local and remote server backups.

Organizations using Veritas Backup Exec can look to ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage for nightly backups. ExaGrid sits behind existing backup applications, such as Veritas Backup Exec, providing faster and more reliable backups and restores. In a network running Veritas Backup Exec, using ExaGrid is as easy as pointing existing backup jobs at a NAS share on the ExaGrid system. Backup jobs are sent directly from the backup application to ExaGrid for backup to disk.

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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