Shorter Backups and ‘Very Quick’ Restores
Owens backs up the department’s data in daily incrementals as well as weekly and monthly fulls. He has noticed a significant reduction in the backup window, particularly the incrementals. “At least two hours have been saved. Before, it was taking about four hours to do a nightly backup, and now that’s down to just an hour and a half!
“Restores are definitely faster now, too. That was one of the biggest changes that we noticed right off the bat once we moved over to the ExaGrid system. The landing zone works well and the restores are very quick,” said Owens.
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 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.