ExaGrid Makes Backups Easier to Manage, Adds Scalability
NCI implemented a two-site ExaGrid system, placing a 50TB system at their headquarters in Houston, with a 40TB grid off site for disaster recovery. ExaGrid works alongside NCI’s existing backup application, Veritas NetBackup, and has helped ease the management of NCI’s backups.
“The ExaGrid system has helped tremendously with the backups we’ve moved off of tape,” said Serres. “For those systems where we’re no longer using tape at all, we are saved from having to make several trips to our data center on a weekly basis. That saves quite a bit of time.”
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).
As NCI’s data grows, the ExaGrid system can easily scale to accommodate data growth. ExaGrid’s software makes the system highly scalable – appliances of any size or age can be mixed and matched in a single system. A single scale-out system can take in up to a 2.7PB full backup plus retention at an ingest rate of up to 488TB per hour. “We liked the scalability,” said Serres. “We liked how simple it was to manage. It was basically a simple backup target. We liked the fact that it was modular, that you could add capacity and processing – not just capacity. That’s very appealing.”