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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Moto Speeds up Backups with ExaGrid

Customer Overview

Founded in 2001, Moto is the leading motorway service area provider in the UK. Based in Toddington, Bedfordshire, Moto has 55+ locations throughout the UK. Moto is a growing company with large amounts of data to protect. With service areas operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it’s particularly critical that the company’s information is backed up within defined backup windows so that network performance isn’t affected during peak business hours. Moto is owned by Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) in partnership with CVC Capital Partners (CVC).

Key Benefits:

  • Dedupe Rate as high as 34:1
  • Effective DR solution
  • Confident to perform incremental backups nightly and full backups each weekend
  • Extremely cost-effective with streamlined operations
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System Performance Affected by Lengthy Nightly Backups

The IT staff at Moto had been backing up the company’s data to tape, but nightly backups began exceeding 12 hours and had started to threaten system and network performance. Moto’s IT department also had issues with tape reliability and occasionally experienced difficulty restoring information.

When Moto invested in a new ERP system, the firm’s IT department worried that the system’s fast growing database would exhaust the capacity of its tape backup system and decided that the time was right to look at a new approach to backup.

"With tape, we constantly had to double and triple check everything, but with ExaGrid, we no longer have to worry about our backups. We have a high degree of confidence in the system and we know that our backups are completed each and every night. The ExaGrid system has been extremely cost-effective and has enabled us to streamline our operations. "

Simon Austin, Systems Architect

ExaGrid Works with Existing Backup Application to Streamline Processes

Moto selected a two-site ExaGrid disk- based backup system to work alongside the company’s existing backup application, ARCserve. Moto runs Citrix software at each of its locations and centrally backs up information at its datacenter located in one of its service areas. A second ExaGrid system was installed at a second service area for disaster recovery and data is replicated between the two sites.

“The ExaGrid system was extremely well priced and provided the data deduplication and scalability we were looking for,” said Simon Austin, systems architect at Moto. “Were able to completely eliminate tape by installing a second ExaGrid system and we now have a more comprehensive disaster recovery plan.”

Data Deduplication Rates as High as 34:1, Speeds Transmission of Data Between Sites

At Moto, ExaGrid’s data deduplication technology is currently providing data deduplication ratios as high as 34:1 on some shares. Moto estimates it has room for a year of data retention on its ExaGrid system.

“ExaGrid’s data deduplication is extremely efficient at reducing our data,” said Austin. “It also makes the data sent between sites move very quickly because it transmits only changes. It’s been extremely impressive.”

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).

Prior to installing the ExaGrid system, the IT staff at Moto had been performing full backups of the firm’s data each night over the course of eight to ten hours. Since installing ExaGrid, Moto has been able to streamline its backup processes and now performs incremental backups nightly and full backups each weekend.

“We felt that it was too risky to perform incremental backups during the week using tape. We simply didn’t trust it,” said Austin. “However, the ExaGrid system is so reliable that we decided to run incrementals during the week and full backups on weekends only. We’re very comfortable with our backup procedures now and things run much more smoothly.”

Scale-out Architecture Provides Easy Scalability

For Austin, scalability was also an important factor in choosing ExaGrid. 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.

“When we purchased the system, we knew that our data was going to continue to grow rapidly and it was important to make sure that any system we brought in-house would be able to scale seamlessly to meet our needs,” said Austin. “ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture will enable us to easily expand the system to accommodate larger amounts of data in the future.”

Knowledgeable Customer Support, Turnkey Solution

ExaGrid’s customer support staff are all in-house ExaGrid employees experienced in backup technologies and products. “ExaGrid’s customer support has been brilliant,” said Austin. “Our ExaGrid support engineer has a high level of understanding of our environment and of their own product. It’s been a pleasure to work with him.”

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.

“With tape, we constantly had to double and triple check everything, but with ExaGrid, we no longer have to worry about our backups. We have a high degree of confidence in the system and we know that our backups are being completed each and every night,” said Austin. “Using ExaGrid for our backups has been extremely cost-effective for us and has enabled us to streamline our operations.”

ExaGrid and Arcserve Backup

Efficient backup requires close integration between the backup software and backup storage. That is the advantage delivered by the partnership between Arcserve and ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage. Together, Arcserve and ExaGrid provide a cost-effective backup solution that scales to meet the needs of demanding enterprise environments.

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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