Scalable ExaGrid System Keeps Up with Growth
LeStourgeon appreciates how well ExaGrid’s data deduplication has maximized the storage capacity in L&B’s backup environment. “The best feature about ExaGrid is its deduplication. We keep a retention of three months’ worth of backups, and deduplication has helped keep that manageable; we would have a lot less space available otherwise. We’ve had a great experience with our ExaGrid system, it’s helped us keep up with our current demands on backing up our data.”
As the years have passed, L&B has switched to a newer, larger ExaGrid appliance model at its primary site, and relocated the existing appliance to add to the DR site. “ExaGrid Support helped us to configure our new appliance and the one that we moved to our DR site, and migrate the data from one appliance to the other. It was a very simple and easy process,” said LeStourgeon.
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.
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).