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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid Alleviates Slow Restores, Long Backup Times at Logan & Company

Customer Overview

Since the firm’s inception in 1990, Logan & Company has been retained to manage the administrative and information requirements of many of the nation’s largest bankruptcy proceedings. The company’s experience spans a wide range of industries, including consumer products, energy, financial services, healthcare, insurance, and transportation. The firm is located in Upper Montclair, New Jersey.

Key Benefits:

  • System is easy to use and maintain
  • Customer support model receives “rave reviews”
  • Restores are fast and reliable
  • Backups are faster and more efficient; full access to systems while backups are running
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Problematic Restores From Tape

The IT staff at Logan & Company began looking for a new backup solution because of growing frustration with long, unreliable restores from tape. “In our business, we need to have ironclad access to our critical information. Unfortunately, when there’s an issue, tape isn’t the ideal medium for restoring data,” said Jack Fuller, network operations manager for Logan & Company. “For us, restoring data from tape was slow and painful, and at the end of the day, there were no guarantees that the information would be there when we needed it.”

"In our business, we need to have ironclad access to our critical information [...] For us, restoring data from tape was slow and painful, and at the end of the day, there were no guarantees that the information would be there when we needed it. "

Jack Fuller, Network Operations Manager

Easy Restores, Faster Backups with ExaGrid

After looking at FalconStor and a few other solutions, Logan & Company decided on ExaGrid. The ExaGrid system works alongside Veritas Backup Exec, the firm’s backup application.

“We were immediately struck by how easy the ExaGrid system was to manage and maintain,” he said. “Also, the fact that ExaGrid’s support model received rave reviews from customers made the decision an easy one.”

Since installing the ExaGrid system, restores take far less time and can be completed with just a few keystrokes, Fuller said. “Restoring files from the ExaGrid system is very simple, and we’re far more confident in our ability to restore now than when we were using tape,” he said. “The other thing we’ve noticed is that our backup times are faster and more efficient. We used to have to back up to tape after hours, which meant that our mail server and our Oracle server would be unavailable to users. Now, our backup jobs run throughout the day and we have full access to our systems while they’re running.”

Deduplication Reduces Data Stored, Scale-out Architecture Provides Easy Scalability

Fuller said that the company’s data growth had been constant, but due to a spike in new cases recently, the IT staff has seen a dramatic increase in the amount of backup data they now handle. Keeping pace with data growth has been more manageable with ExaGrid’s built-in data deduplication technology, and its scale-out architecture will ensure that the system serves the company for years to come. “ExaGrid’s data deduplication technology reduces our stored data by 14:1, and it’s great that we have
the ability to easily upgrade the system to handle increased capacity,” said Fuller.

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).

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.

Intuitive Interface and World-Class Customer Support

“The ExaGrid system is extremely easy to use, and I like having the choice of a GUI or a command-line interface. It’s a pretty hands-off system but when I do have to work on it, I find that it’s very intuitive,” Fuller said.

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.

“ExaGrid’s customer support has gone way beyond my expectations. The support engineers are experienced and knowledgeable, and I’ve never had to escalate an issue. They’re proactive and look at the system remotely from time to time to advise me about retention space and other potential issues,” he said.

“Since installing the ExaGrid system, we’ve achieved our original goal of making restores easier, but our overall backup processes have been significantly improved as well.”

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.

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