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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid Supports Lusitania’s Diverse Backup Environment, Increasing Data Protection

Customer Overview

Lusitania emerged in the insurance market in 1986 as the first Insurance Company with 100% Portuguese capital. Since then, and over more than 30 years, it has always designed itself as a company with an eye on the future. A reliable partner in all situations, focusing on creating value for the national economy, in order to contribute decisively to the progress and well-being of the entire Portuguese society.

Key Benefits:

  • Lusitania able to back up all of its data after switch to ExaGrid, including its Oracle databases, and replication to AWS cloud
  • ExaGrid cuts backup window in half for Oracle data, and offers fast VM backups with Veeam
  • ‘Incredible’ deduplication allows Lusitania to back up more data and increase retention
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Lusitania Installs ExaGrid After Impressive POC

For many years, the IT staff at Lusitania Seguros used IBM TSM to back up the insurance company’s data to a NetApp disk solution. After implementing VMware, the company installed Veeam, which worked well in the virtualized environment, and after a few years, they decided to build upon that solution. “We wanted to expand our Veeam solution and we also needed to back up more Oracle databases and file servers, but we didn’t have enough time in our backup window to add more backup jobs,” said Miguel Rodelo, senior systems engineer at Lusitania. “We decided to test new solutions, and started to request proofs of concept (POC) for different products.”

At that same time, Rodelo and his reseller attended VMWorld 2018 in Barcelona. During a discussion at lunch, the two spoke about options and the reseller mentioned ExaGrid as a possible solution to test. They stopped by the ExaGrid booth at the conference to learn more about the tiered backup storage solution, and ended up requesting a POC. “We decided together to bet on the ExaGrid technology,” said Rodelo. “I said that if the technology is as good as it claims to be I will buy it, and my reseller said that if it was that good, he would tell every client in Portugal about it. “ExaGrid was the last POC that we were analyzing, and it ended up being the fastest and easiest to implement, and compared to the other products
we were looking into at the same time, it was clear that ExaGrid offered the best backup performance, especially when it came to our Oracle data. I expected ExaGrid to integrate well with Veeam, and it did, but when I saw that I can also use Oracle RMAN to make direct backups to ExaGrid, I decided to implement ExaGrid as our central data storage for backups,” said Rodelo.

ExaGrid eliminates the need for expensive primary storage for database backups without affecting the ability to use familiar built-in database protection tools. While built-in database tools for Oracle and SQL provide the basic capability to back up and recover these mission-critical databases, adding an ExaGrid system allows database administrators to gain control over their data protection needs at a lower cost and with less complexity. ExaGrid’s support of Oracle RMAN Channels provides the fastest backup, fastest restore performance, and failover for multi- hundred terabyte databases.

"Deduplication software can’t compare when it comes to the dedupe ratios we see with ExaGrid. ExaGrid’s claims are true: ExaGrid offers excellent deduplication while providing better backup performance than other solutions. "

Miguel Rodelo, Senior Systems Engineer

ExaGrid Cuts Backup Window of Oracle Data in Half

Lusitania installed an ExaGrid system at its primary site and plans to install a second ExaGrid system for disaster recovery (DR). Rodelo backs up Lusitania’s critical data in daily incrementals as well as backing up all data on a weekly and monthly basis. In addition to backing up data to the ExaGrid system, Rodelo also stores copies of backups on cloud storage, using Amazon Web Services (AWS). ExaGrid supports data center replication to AWS. ExaGrid’s approach of using an ExaGrid VM in AWS to AWS storage preserves many ExaGrid features when replicating to AWS, such as a single user interface for the onsite ExaGrid and the data in AWS, replication encryption, and bandwidth set and throttle, as well as providing encryption of data at rest in AWS.

Since using ExaGrid, Rodelo has noticed a major reduction of the backup windows for data backed up using Oracle RMAN. “Before using ExaGrid, backing up our principal database took three to four days, and trying to restore a database took up to a week because some of the restores of the transaction logs became very problematic to implement. Now that we use ExaGrid, our backup window has been cut in half and we can restore our databases within one workday,” he said. “Our Veeam backups are also very fast. I am able to back up all of our VMs, over 200, in under two and half hours, and restoring data using ExaGrid and Veeam is also very quick.”

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).

‘Incredible’ Deduplication Allows for More Backup Jobs and Increased Retention

The data deduplication that ExaGrid provides has resulted in storage savings, allowing Lusitania to back up more of its data and expanding retention so that more restore points are available. “Deduplication software can’t compare when it comes to the dedupe ratios we see with ExaGrid. ExaGrid’s claims are true: ExaGrid offers excellent deduplication while providing better backup performance than other solutions,” said Rodelo.

Rodelo has been able to take advantage of the storage savings provided by ExaGrid’s deduplication. “Before using ExaGrid, we were only able to back up our VMware environments. Now that we use ExaGrid, we have also added backups of the production environment as well. The deduplication is incredible! Even though we’ve added more backup jobs, we are only using 60% of the capacity of our ExaGrid system,” he said. In addition, Rodelo has been able to increase retention so that there are more restore points to recover data from. “We can maintain more weeks of backups from Oracle and we have doubled the amount of restore points of our Veeam data.”

‘Fantastic’ Customer Support for Reliable Backup System

Rodelo appreciates the quality of customer support that ExaGrid provides, and likes working with an assigned ExaGrid support engineer as a single point of contact. “My ExaGrid support engineer is fantastic! Whenever I’ve had any questions, either during installation or when configuring ExaGrid with other products, like AWS, he’s always been helpful in explaining best practices and advising us on any decisions we need to make about our backup environment. ExaGrid support is the best I’ve worked with.”

Rodelo finds that switching to ExaGrid has minimized the amount of time spent managing backups and that the system’s reliability gives him confidence that data is always available when needed. “ExaGrid is great because it works with the different backup applications we use. It’s given me a sense of security that our data is backed up in case of disaster and that I can restore the data without any issues. Our backups run perfectly so I don’t have to worry, and I have peace of mind while going about my workday,” he 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. Customer’s never have to repeat themselves to various support staff, and issues get resolved quickly.

About A2it Tecnologia

Founded in 2006, A2it Tecnologia results from the merger of Additive Tecnologia and ATWB Consultoria, two companies in the information technology area of ​​the ADDITIVE Group. A2it provides national coverage both in Portugal and in Brazil, and is characterized by its commitment and innovation in its approach, both to customers in particular and to the market in general. A2it is recognized as a reference company in the provision of specialized services in information technologies.

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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