Ready to Talk to a System Engineer?

Please enter your information and we'll contact you to set up a call. Thank you!

Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Lawndale Christian Health Center Shortens Lengthy Backup Window, Tightens Disaster Recovery Capability with ExaGrid

Customer Overview

Lawndale Christian Health Center (LCHC) is an urban community-based nonprofit organization, founded in 1984. Located in Chicago, LCHC provides quality primary care services without regard for a patient’s ability to pay and serves as a community resource for eliminating health disparities. LCHC’s 50+ healthcare providers treat over 119,000 patient visits each year at three sites located in the Lawndale area.

Key Benefits:

  • Reduced backup window from 12 hours to under 8
  • Incredibly fast & painless restores
  • ExaGrid is a ‘set it and forget it’ type of product
  • Seamless scalability for the future
Download PDF

Long Backup Times, Concern about Disaster Recovery with Tape

Lawndale Christian Health Center’s IT department had been backing up its data to tape, but long backup times made it nearly impossible to get complete backups during off hours when the facility is closed.

“Our clinic is open on weekends, and it was extremely difficult to get our full backups completed with tape,” said David Wang, network infrastructure administrator at LCHC. “We were also concerned about disaster recovery. With tape, there’s no guarantee that the data will be there when you need it. We decided to look for an alternative backup approach that would enable us to stay within our backup window and improve our ability to recover from a disaster.”

"The ExaGrid is a terrific product. We were in a terrible spot in regard to our backup times and our disaster recovery situation, but installing the ExaGrid system has solved both problems for us. We no longer have issues meeting our backup window, and we’re able to get complete backups each and every time. The ExaGrid system has done everything we wanted and more. "

David Wang, Network Infrastructure Administrator

Two-Site ExaGrid System Delivers Fast Backups, Data Replication

After considering various backup approaches, LCHC decided to purchase a two-site ExaGrid disk based backup system with data deduplication. The center installed both appliances in its data center and plans to move one of them to its disaster recovery site in the future. Data is automatically replicated each night from the primary ExaGrid system to the second system in case it is needed for disaster recovery.

The ExaGrid system works along with LCHC’s existing backup application, Veritas Backup Exec. We’ve been using Backup Exec for a long time, so we needed a solution that would work seamlessly with it. The ExaGrid works extremely well with Backup Exec and the two products together make for a very powerful solution,” said Wang.

Since installing the ExaGrid system, LCHC has been able to significantly reduce backup times, and the IT staff can now complete full backups each week without fail. “With the ExaGrid, we’re able to run multiple backup jobs at once, so our backups are more efficient and less time consuming. Our backup job for the file server alone used to take more than 12 hours. Now we’re able to get all backup jobs done in less than eight hours. It’s quite a relief,” said Wang. “The other area where we’ve seen a big improvement is in restores. Restores are incredibly fast and painless, especially compared to tape.”

Data Deduplication Maximizes Disk Space

Wang said that ExaGrid’s data deduplication technology maximizes disk space and has enabled him to increase retention in case it is needed for a restore.

“ExaGrid’s data deduplication is automatic, and it happens in the background. It does a wonderful job at reducing our data, and the daily email that I receive with our deduplication ratios and other important information is very helpful,” he said.

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).

Easy Management, Superior Customer Support

Wang said that setting up the ExaGrid system was simple. “We set the equipment up and called in to our ExaGrid customer support engineer. He walked us through the interface, and it was very easy. All we had to do was create disk volumes and we were off and running,” Wang said. “The ExaGrid is very intuitive to operate, and it saves me lots of time because I don’t have to manage tape or juggle backup jobs anymore. It simply runs and I get email messages with status updates daily. It really is a ‘set it and forget it’ type of product.”

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 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.

“The ExaGrid is a terrific product. We were in a terrible spot in regards to our backup times and our disaster recovery situation, but installing the ExaGrid system has solved both problems for us. It’s a very simple, intuitive solution that can easily and seamlessly scale to meet our future needs,” said Wang. “We no longer have issues meeting our backup window and we’re able to get complete backups each and every time. The ExaGrid system has done everything we wanted and more.”

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.

Intelligent Data Protection

ExaGrid’s turnkey disk-based backup system combines enterprise drives with zone-level data deduplication, delivering a disk-based solution that is far more cost effective than simply backing up to disk with deduplication or using backup software deduplication to disk. ExaGrid’s patented zone-level deduplication reduces the disk space needed by a range of 10:1 to 50:1, depending on the data types and retention periods, by storing only the unique objects across backups instead of redundant data. Adaptive Deduplication performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups. As data is being deduplicated to the repository, it is also replicated to a second ExaGrid site or the public cloud for disaster recovery (DR).

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.

Talk to us about your needs

ExaGrid is the expert in backup storage—it’s all we do.

Request Pricing

Our team is trained to ensure that your system is properly sized and supported to meet your growing data needs.

Contact us for pricing »

Talk With One of Our System Engineers

With ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage, each appliance in the system brings with it not only disk, but also memory, bandwidth, and processing power—all the elements needed to maintain high backup performance.

Schedule call »

Schedule Proof of Concept (POC)

Test ExaGrid by installing it in your environment to experience improved backup performance, faster restores, ease of use, and scalability. Put it to the test! 8 out of 10 who test it, decide to keep it.

Schedule now »