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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Microserve Offers Clients Same Secure ExaGrid-Veeam Solution Used to Backup Up Its Own Data

Customer Overview

Microserve is headquartered in Burnaby, BC, with offices in Victoria, Calgary and Edmonton. Founded in 1987, they support the IT needs of businesses and organizations across industries throughout British Columbia and Alberta, with clients ranging from small to mid-sized operations and enterprise-level organizations. They partner with each of our clients, regardless of size, to provide custom, responsive IT support and solutions that propel our clients toward their goals.

Key Benefits:

  • After switching to ExaGrid for its internal backups, Microserve realized it was a better solution to use for client data as well
  • ExaGrid’s secure tiered architecture and Retention Time-Lock feature gives the IT provider and clients peace of mind
  • Microserve able to offer clients longer retention due to improved deduplication from ExaGrid-Veeam solution
  • ExaGrid solution scales easily and works ‘as advertised’
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Microserve Expands Its Own ExaGrid Usage to Benefit Clients

Microserve uses ExaGrid as a replication target at its DR site for its internal data. It also backs up its client data to ExaGrid systems using Veeam. The IT team at Microserve had switched to ExaGrid as a backup target behind Veeam, replacing NAS servers. The team found it to be a superior solution for backing up its own data and decided to offer ExaGrid as an option to its clients for its Backup and Disaster Recovery services.

“We liked the way ExaGrid worked in our internal infrastructure and realized it would be a better backup solution for our clients,” said Cyrus Lim, solutions architect at Microserve. 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.

"The Retention Time-Lock feature with delayed deletes and immutability that ExaGrid provides was key in our decision to offer our clients ExaGrid as an option. It gives our clients and us peace of mind.” "

Cyrus Lim, Solutions Architect

ExaGrid’s Secure Architecture Provides Peace of Mind

One of the reasons that Microserve switched to ExaGrid was because of the superior data protection that its two-tier architecture offers. “ExaGrid’s Retention Time-Lock feature with delayed deletes and immutability was key in our decision to offer ExaGrid to our clients as an option. It gives our clients and us peace of mind,” said Lim.

ExaGrid appliances have a network-facing disk-cache Landing Zone Tier (tiered air gap) where the most recent backups are stored in an undeduplicated format for fast backup and restore performance. Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing tier called the Repository Tier, where recent and retention deduplicated data is stored for longer-term retention. The combination of a non-network-facing tier (virtual air gap) plus delayed deletes and immutable data objects guards against the backup data being deleted or encrypted. ExaGrid’s offline tier is ready for recovery in the event of an attack.

Better Deduplication Allows for Longer Retention

Lim backs up Microserve’s data on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis. He appreciates that the deduplication that the ExaGrid-Veeam solution provides storage savings, leaving a greater capacity for long-term retention. “We’re able to extend the amount of retention we offer to clients and increase our own retention as well. The improved dedupe reduces the penalty of keeping of multiple copies,” he said.

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.

ExaGrid-Veeam Accelerated Data Mover

ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover so that backups are written Veeam-to-Veeam versus Veeam-to CIFS, which provides a 30% increase in backup performance. Since the Veeam Data Mover is not an open standard, it is far more secure than using CIFS and other open market protocols. In addition, because ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover, Veeam synthetic fulls can be created six times faster than any other solution. ExaGrid stores the most recent Veeam backups in an undeduplicated form in its Landing Zone and has the Veeam Data Mover running on each ExaGrid appliance and has a processor in each appliance in a scale-out architecture. This combination of Landing Zone, Veeam Data Mover, and scale-out compute provides the fastest Veeam synthetic fulls versus any other solution on the market.

Instant Restores and Running a VM from ExaGrid Landing Zone

Lim has been impressed with how quickly data can be restored using the ExaGrid-Veeam solution during regular DR testing and, on rare occasions, when a file retrieval is required. In one instance, the capability to boot a VM directly from ExaGrid was key to keeping the production environment going while resolving an unexpected issue.

“When our remote cluster went offline, the ability to instantly restore and run VMs from our internal ExaGrid system gave us time and flexibility as the VMs were added back to the production disks in stages as we completed the fuller restores, based on priority”, said Lim, addressing the solutions’ instant data restore capabilities.

ExaGrid and Veeam can instantly recover a file or VMware virtual machine by running it directly from the ExaGrid appliance in the event that the file is lost, corrupted or encrypted or the primary storage VM becomes unavailable. This instant recovery is possible because of ExaGrid’s Landing Zone – a high-speed disk cache on the ExaGrid appliance that retains the most recent backups in their complete form. Once the primary storage environment has been brought back to a working state, the VM backed up on the ExaGrid appliance can then be migrated to primary storage for continued operation.

Scalable System Works ‘As Advertised’

Lim appreciates how easy it is to manage the ExaGrid systems; he appreciates how easy it is to scale out the systems by adding new appliances as more storage is needed. 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. “Adding new ExaGrid appliances to existing systems is a smooth process, especially with the help of our ExaGrid support engineer, who has helped us work through bugs, install updates, and join the domain during the installation process,” says Lim. “ExaGrid’s support is better than the average support we receive from other vendors, especially as our ExaGrid support engineer also does the firmware updates on our systems for us and is active about staying engaged with us and making sure our ExaGrid systems are running well. We don’t typically run into issues while managing our internal backups or backup services for our clients; with ExaGrid, we can set it and forget it. I’m very happy with the performance and the deduplication we get from our ExaGrid systems – it really works as advertised.”

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.

After taking time to carefully assess the use cases and technical requirements needed to combine ExaGrid’s services with Veeam’s industry-leading virtual server data protection solutions, Microserve is proud to provide the same ExaGrid-Veeam Solution to its customers.

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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