Quick Restores Keep Engineering Projects on Track
Blair backs up Murraysmith’s key servers in incrementals, every two hours, as well as with a weekly synthetic full backup, and a monthly backup. “Our backups run fairly quickly, the incrementals average about 15 minutes and most of our weekly fulls take a few hours; although fulls of our largest servers can take up to 24 hours, due to the fact that much of the data stored on them are AutoCAD files, which are very large and complex. The ExaGrid system is reliable, so we’ve never had a problem with our backup jobs,” said Blair.
Blair finds that restoring data is quick, too. “We need to restore data pretty often. Many of our engineers use AutoCAD, and as they’re working through a project and tweaking their CAD files and models, they might end up going down a path that doesn’t work. At that point, they reach out to us and ask if we can revert a file to a previous version. We’re able to help them with that quickly and easily thanks to ExaGrid and Veeam. Compared to older file-based backups, using our ExaGrid-Veeam solution is heaven. I would recommend this solution over anything I’ve used in the past.”
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.