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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid Selected by New England Law | Boston for Price and Scalability

Customer Overview

Located in the heart of Boston’s legal community, New England Law | Boston offers an academic program that emphasizes extensive preparation in practical skills, focusing on experiential learning opportunities. Founded in 1908 as Portia Law School, the only law school established exclusively for the education of women, New England Law | Boston has been coeducational since 1938. It was renamed from New England School of Law in 2008.

Key Benefits:

  • Deduplication approach reduced backup times from as high as 30 hours down to 12-18 hours
  • Tight integration with Veritas Backup Exec OST updates system catalog during replication
  • Deduplication ratios as high as 16:1
  • Retention increased from two weeks to 16 weeks
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School Concerned with DR and Capacity Management

New England Law | Boston had concerns about the evolution of its existing backup strategy, which was becoming less than optimal from both a disaster recovery and operational perspective. This, as well as the ability to support increasing service demands led the institution to rethink its practice and investigate a more appropriate strategy.

“We were facing operational limitations with our previous strategy, such as capacity management and lengthy backup times which ran anywhere from 24 to 30 or more hours. Plus we were always limited by disk provisioning constraints which resulted in more complexity, and significant investments in time spent managing backup targets when capacity on any one volume hit a threshold. We knew deduplication technology would give us some quick benefits, but the issues with sizing limitations, processing overhead and certainly DR would still need to be addressed.”

"The ExaGrid system was cost effective and more scalable than the Dell EMC Data Domain product, which for a similar price point, limited us in total capacity and required significant labor and planning just to extend us to the next level. We also like ExaGrid’s approach to the deduplication process which focuses on backing up the data as quickly as possible, helping to meet and exceed our backup windows. "

Derek Lofstrom, Senior Network Engineer

ExaGrid Chosen for Cost and Scalability

After looking at several different solutions, including solutions utilizing Dell EMC Data Domain and VNX systems, the school chose a two-site ExaGrid system with data deduplication because of its tight integration with the school’s existing backup application (Veritas Backup Exec), cost in relation to scalability and feature set, and built-in replication to protect a wide range of data, including student records, business data, and machine data.

“The ExaGrid system was cost effective and more scalable than the Dell EMC Data Domain product, which for a similar price point limited us in total capacity and required significant labor and planning just to extend us to the next level. We also like ExaGrid’s approach to the deduplication process which focuses on backing up the data as quickly as possible, helping to meet and exceed our backup windows,” Lofstrom said. Tight integration with Backup Exec also played a part in the decision, he said. “We liked the fact that the ExaGrid system works with OST, so data that is replicated between sites can be updated in the system’s catalog without additional processing and scheduling. This increases our flexibility and makes our recovery processes run more efficiently.”

Backup Times Dramatically Reduced, Improved Retention

Before installing the ExaGrid system, the school had been backing up its data from disk to tape. Now, even though the school has increased its strategy to a disk-to-disk- to-tape process, it has still seen its backup windows reduced from 24 to 30 hours to just 12 to18 hours on average for a complete weekend backup. The ExaGrid system has been delivering data deduplication ratios as high as 16:1, which has helped to improve retention from two weeks to 16 weeks.

“We’ve essentially expanded and improved our data protection portfolio in a way that also reduces our overhead. We’re keeping more copies of the data for longer periods in a way that traditionally equated to significant time and storage tradeoffs. The gains we’ve seen in retention help us to be more flexible in terms of what services we can deliver to the business and to our users. For example, we’ve been asked in the past how much it would cost to keep certain data for longer periods of time, and our answer has always been relative to tape technology and tier 1 disk costs. Now, we can be more flexible in our retention policies, enabling us to deliver on those same requests without additional investment,” Lofstrom said.

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).

Easy Setup, Experienced Customer Support

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.

“The initial installation only took about an hour, and since then, the system has been up and running without issue. I don’t have to worry about managing capacity anymore, our dependence on tape has gone down, and I get a daily report with backup summaries and statistical information on system usage and allocations that alerts me to any potential problem,” said Lofstrom.

ExaGrid’s customer support has also been a highlight for Lofstrom. “I like that we have an assigned support engineer who knows the product inside and out. With many other vendors, you call in and roll the dice, and oftentimes, you get someone who’s been there a week and doesn’t know anything about the product. That hasn’t been our experience with ExaGrid. The technical support we’ve received has been incredible.”

Scale-out Architecture Ensures Scalability

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.

ExaGrid appliances contain not just disk but also processing power, memory, and bandwidth. When the system needs to expand, additional appliances are simply added to the existing system. The system scales linearly, maintaining a fixed-length backup window as data grows so customers only pay for what they need, when they need it. Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing Repository Tier with automatic load balancing and global deduplication across all repositories. Lofstrom said that he expects New England Law | Boston to eventually scale the ExaGrid system up to handle increasing amounts of data.

“Every year, we’re bringing new services online and we’re also digitizing a lot of our data so that we can stream more content, which translates into lots more data to back up. With the ExaGrid system, we’re confident that we’ll be able to meet our backup needs today and into the future without having to perform a forklift upgrade, which we would have to do with some of the other systems we looked at,” he said. “The ExaGrid system was a good choice for our environment. It fit seamlessly into our infrastructure and it’s worked as promised.

ExaGrid and Veritas Backup Exec

Veritas Backup Exec provides cost-effective, high-performance backup and recovery – including continuous data protection for Microsoft Exchange servers, Microsoft SQL servers, file servers, and workstations. High-performance agents and options provide fast, flexible, granular protection and scalable management of local and remote server backups. Organizations using Veritas Backup Exec can look to ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage for nightly backups. ExaGrid sits behind existing backup applications, such as Veritas Backup Exec, providing faster and more reliable backups and restores. In a network running Veritas Backup Exec, using ExaGrid is as easy as pointing existing backup jobs at a NAS share on the ExaGrid system. Backup jobs are sent directly from the backup application to ExaGrid for backup to disk.

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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