Backing Up and Restoring Critical Data Quickly and Easily
Milton CAT uses Microsoft Dynamics AX for its ERP business system, which handles everything from the company’s invoicing to inventory management and warehousing. “Everything that we really need is built into the Microsoft Dynamics AX platform, and the entire ERP infrastructure here is approximately 40 servers. The back end of the ERP system is made up of SQL servers, and there are a lot of other peripheral servers connected to the solution for business intelligence and interface communications and EDI. Aside from the Dynamics system, we also back up a few other business-critical applications and Microsoft data, as well as our Voice over IP (VoIP) Cisco telephony system. In the case of the phone system, it’s nice to be able to take snapshot backups of the machines. They happen to be UNIX/Linux machines, and we can back those up with Veeam and send them right off to ExaGrid, which is great,” said Weber.
“Backups are crucial because they ensure that we can retrieve business-critical data for the company. Most Information Technology teams who are managing backups at a mid-sized company have a lot of other things to worry about as well, like managing an infrastructure, delivering applications to end users, and driving the company forward with technology. What we really wanted was a solid target device to back up data to, and a system that allowed us to ‘set it and forget it,’ and ExaGrid is just that. We needed a solid platform that would meet our SLAs, and our backups have worked great using ExaGrid and Veeam.
“We’ve done some testing to restore full machines, and that process went much faster than it had with Avamar. We can restore a 100GB virtual server in under 15 minutes, which certainly meets our SLA; Avamar took closer to an hour. So we’re definitely happy with how quickly can restore data from our new solution,” said Weber.
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).