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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid and New Balance Focus on Top Performing Disk-Based Backup

Customer Overview

New Balance Athletic Shoe, Inc. (NB), best known as simply New Balance, is an American footwear manufacturer based in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The company was founded in 1906 as the “New Balance Arch Support Company” and is one of the world’s leading sports footwear manufacturers. Today, New Balance aids athletes in their pursuit of excellence, whether that means helping professional athletes set records and win medals, or propelling everyday

Key Benefits:

  • Restores are faster than ever
  • Backup window reduced by 20%
  • Deduplication maximized disk space
  • Far less time spent managing backups
  • Painless scalability, 1 to 12 appliances
  • Easy integration with Veritas NetBackup
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Restores Win the Race

New Balance had been using tape combined with Symantec MSDP pool solution to back up and protect its data, but economic, restore, and scalability concerns put the company in a position to investigate another solution. Since its decision to do a full replacement, New Balance has deployed 12 ExaGrid appliances and currently backs up between 80-100TB of data between their remote and DR sites around the country.

“Restores matter the most. ExaGrid is fast and reliable – that’s the key to a successful backup solution,” said Henry Li, server support analyst at New Balance. The ExaGrid system stores all daily and weekly backups, which are kept for 33 days. Tape is used for long-term retention, which is kept for 13 months (monthly backup) and 8 years (yearly backup). “ExaGrid is definitely faster than alternatives, because backups write directly to the landing zone, making restores very fast. That is something tape simply cannot compare with,” said Li.

"With ExaGrid support, everything is easy and straightforward. They carry a bit of responsibility along with me. I always have someone to reach out to who has knowledge of the product as well as our environment making my job that much easier."

Henry Li, Server Support Analyst

Fast Backups and Superior Deduplication Raise the Bar

New Balance is seeing an average dedupe ratio of 16:1. “We are storing a lot of data; we have close to 100TB and our data volume is growing fast. If ExaGrid’s deduplication doesn’t perform well, it doesn’t matter how much storage we buy, we’re going to run out,” stated Li.

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).

Customer Support Plays Key Role

Li has been pleased with ExaGrid’s unique customer support model, which is very much unlike his typical support experience with other products. “Customer support is very important to me. There have been times with other products that I’ve called support and the person who answers the phone typically doesn’t know anything about my environment, which is very frustrating.”

“With ExaGrid support, everything is easy and straightforward. They carry a bit of responsibility along with me. I always have someone to reach out to who has knowledge of the product as well as our environment, making my job that much easier in the IT datacenter,” said Li.

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.

ExaGrid and NetBackup

Veritas NetBackup delivers high-performance data protection that scales to protect the largest enterprise environments. ExaGrid is integrated with and certified by Veritas in 9 areas, including Accelerator, AIR, single disk pool, analytics, and other areas to ensure full support of NetBackup. ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage offers the fastest backups, the fastest restores, and the only true scale-out solution as data grows to provide a fixed-length backup window and a non-network-facing tier (tiered air gap) for recovery from a ransomware event.

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).

Architecture Provides Superior Scalability

ExaGrid’s scalable architecture will enable New Balance to continue to expand the system as its backup requirements grow. New Balance started with two ExaGrid appliances and has grown to 11 in the past couple of years in multiple locations.

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. This combination of capabilities in a turnkey appliance makes the ExaGrid system easy to install, manage, and scale. ExaGrid’s architecture provides lifetime value and investment protection that no other architecture can match.

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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