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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Leavitt Group Replaces Unreliable NAS, Stabilizes Backups by Pairing Veeam with ExaGrid

Customer Overview

Founded in 1952, Leavitt Group has grown into the 17th largest privately held insurance brokerage in the United States. The Utah-based company prides itself on its expertise and ability to help its clients succeed. Leavitt Group’s team of insurance professionals consists of individuals with a wide range of expertise, many of whom are considered regional and national leaders in their respective fields.

Key Benefits:

  • Deduplication and scalability allow for increased retention
  • 30% reduction of nightly backup window
  • ExaGrid-Veeam integration cuts Linux NFS as a middleman between app and storage
  • No product obsolescence
  • Reliability eliminates need to ‘babysit’ backups
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ExaGrid Chosen to Replace Unreliable NAS Device

Leavitt Group backs up data for its many affiliate partners at a single data center. The company has had a completely virtualized environment for many years and had used Veeam to manage VMware backups to QNAP NAS and direct attached storage.

Derrick Rose, IT operations engineer, had experienced many issues with the QNAP NAS device and wanted to look into a new solution that would also work with Veeam. “There were issues with that QNAP NAS since day one. Drives on the device would fail, at one point as many as 19 out of 24, but I was able to manually recover them. We needed to store a huge amount of data on the 200TB NAS device, and we were filling it up quickly. It just couldn’t handle all the virtual machines (VMs) that were backing up to it.

“QNAP technicians advised dumbing the backups down to 25 VMs at a time, but we have about 800 VMs that need to be backed up in a ten-hour window, so that would not have worked. Every time I tried to back up all of our data, it would lock up and then not respond. That was the deal breaker.” Rose looked into other storage solutions, including Cisco and Dell EMC Data Domain. He contacted his Veeam representative, who highly recommended ExaGrid for its exceptional integration with Veeam. Rose researched ExaGrid and was impressed by its evergreen approach, which eliminates product obsolescence. He was also interested in data deduplication, as he had experienced capacity issues with the QNAP NAS solution.

"It was quite a process to deal with a middleman between the NAS and Veeam, which was cut out when we switched to ExaGrid. Now, it’s a much simpler solution to set up. "

Derrick Rose, IT Operations Engineer

Reliable Backups Stay Within Window

Rose installed an ExaGrid system at Leavitt Group’s data center. Over the course of a year, Rose backs up almost a petabyte of data, regularly backing up 220TB of raw data. Each of Leavitt Group’s many affiliates has its own SQL box and file server as well as insurance applications to back up, and Rose manages those in a Citrix environment. Rose runs a full backup to the ExaGrid system each night as well as a weekly full that is copied and replicated offsite. He also creates a Shadow Copy of the file servers every two hours, with a nightly snapshot of the whole VM. Nightly backups are staggered, and now the 800 VMs are completely backed up within seven hours, which is a major improvement from the ten-hour window that Rose struggled to maintain with the QNAP NAS device. “We try to leave VMware, the ESXI hosts alone as much as possible, especially during the day when it’s being used. It’s awesome to be able to utilize the ExaGrid to run our replications and backup copy jobs from the main backup file off the ExaGrid. The ExaGrid is on a dual 40G Ethernet connection, and at our DR site we have a 1G fiber connection between the DR site and the data center, so replications run pretty quickly.”

Rose appreciates the reliability of his ExaGrid system. “The peace of mind I have gained from using ExaGrid is so nice. I don’t have to babysit it; I don’t have to check on it every hour of the day. It actually works as advertised, and it’s very stable. I would highly recommend ExaGrid to anyone looking for a backup storage solution. It is definitely the right choice. The pricing on the system can’t be beat, and the fact that there is no end-of-life is incredible.”

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).

‘Impressive’ Deduplication and Scalability Key to Increasing Retention

Leavitt Group had been keeping retention of one year but plans to increase that to three years now that the ExaGrid system is in place, due to deduplication maximizing storage capacity and the system’s scalability.

“We eventually want to keep up to three years’ retention. Our current ExaGrid was set up for one year, and now we plan to expand the system as needed. So far, we have about 11 months of backups, and everything is working really well. We’ve been able to restore data many times, and we haven’t had any issues. Everything is going as planned as far as our RTO,” said Rose.

ExaGrid’s award-winning scale-out architecture provides customers with a fixed-length backup window regardless of data growth. Its unique disk-cache Landing Zone allows for the fastest backups and retains the most recent backup in its full undeduplicated form, enabling the fastest restores. ExaGrid’s appliance models can be mixed and matched into a single scale-out system allowing a full backup of up to 2.7PB with a combined ingest rate of 488TB/hr, in a single system. The appliances automatically join the scale-out system. Each appliance includes the appropriate amount of processor, memory, disk, and bandwidth for the data size. By adding compute with capacity, the backup window remains fixed in length as the data grows. Automatic load balancing across all repositories allows for full utilization of all appliances. Data is deduplicated into an offline repository, and additionally, data is globally deduplicated across all repositories. This combination of capabilities in a turnkey appliance makes the ExaGrid system easy to install, manage, and scale. ExaGrid’s architecture provides lifetime value and investment protection that no other architecture can match.

Prior to using ExaGrid, Leavitt Group had not been deduping its data, which caused capacity issues with the previous solution. With ExaGrid, Leavitt Group is able to achieve an average dedupe ratio of 8:1. “The deduplication is awesome. Our ExaGrid system is able to store nearly 1PB of data that we accumulate in a year using just 230TB of storage, which is impressive,” said Rose.

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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