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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid Provides Storage Savings and Enhances Data Protection for New Hampshire General Court

Customer Overview

The General Court of New Hampshire is the bicameral state legislature of the U.S. state of New Hampshire. The lower house is the New Hampshire House of Representatives with 400 members. The upper house is the New Hampshire Senate with 24 members. The General Court convenes in the New Hampshire State House in downtown Concord.

Key Benefits:

  • ExaGrid’s unique Adaptive Deduplication process eases strain on network
  • ExaGrid-Veeam solution provides ‘incredible’ deduplication
  • ExaGrid simplifies backup management which frees up staff time
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Upgrades Result in ‘Lightning-Fast’ Backup Environment

The General Court of New Hampshire upgraded its IT infrastructure to an improved network that boosted internal bandwidth and to use the combined solution of ExaGrid and Veeam. “They’ve been working very well together,” said Ray Larose, senior information systems engineer at the General Court. “ExaGrid and Veeam seem like they’re built to work together as one seamless unit. Now that we’ve updated our environment, everything’s lightning fast.”

Veeam’s backup solutions and ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage combine for the industry’s fastest backups, fastest restores, a scale-out storage system as data grows, and a strong ransomware recovery story – all at the lowest cost.

"Using ExaGrid has given me a sense of security, since I know our backups are available and can spin up fast. I can tell the COO with confidence that if anything ever goes down, we have the resources to restore our data and we will be able to get up and running again quickly. "

Ray Larose, Sr. Information Systems Engineer

ExaGrid’s Adaptive Deduplication Process Eases Replication

The General Court installed an ExaGrid system at its primary site that replicates data to a second ExaGrid system for disaster recovery (DR). Larose has found that the ExaGrid-Veeam solution easily backs up the virtualized environment. Larose backs up the General Court’s data on a daily basis, in addition to a weekly and monthly backup and is pleased with how time-efficient backups are. “Our backups take about 40 minutes,” he said.

“The ExaGrid system is so reliable. We haven’t had any issues, it’s very much a set-it-and-forget-it solution.” He especially appreciates ExaGrid’s Adaptive Deduplication process, which has eased strain on the network. “One of the best features about ExaGrid is that it deduplicates our data before it’s replicated to our DR site. Now that there is less data moving over to the second site, we’ve noticed an improvement from before, when full, undeduplicated data was streaming across the fiber connection,” said Larose.

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).

“Using ExaGrid has given me a sense of security, since I know our backups are available and can spin up fast. I can tell the COO with confidence that if anything ever goes down, we have the resources to restore our data and we will be able to get up and running again quickly.”

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.

‘Incredible’ Deduplication Saves on Storage

Larose has been impressed with the storage savings that the ExaGrid-Veeam solution provides. “The deduplication and compression are really incredible. There’s so much data on our file servers that is duplicated and redundant, so it’s a relief that ExaGrid has the intelligence to only pull data once and manage the changed files, which ends up being a huge savings in terms of storage.” Veeam uses changed block tracking to perform a level of data deduplication. ExaGrid allows Veeam deduplication and Veeam dedupe-friendly compression to stay on. ExaGrid will increase Veeam’s deduplication by a factor of about 7:1 to a total combined deduplication ratio of 14:1, reducing the storage required and saving on storage costs up front and over time.

Strong Relationship with ExaGrid Support

Larose appreciates ExaGrid’s support model of working with an assigned customer support engineer. “ExaGrid’s support is personable and hands-on, which creates a much stronger relationship than other vendors provide. My ExaGrid support engineer upgrades our ExaGrid system for us, and discusses how the upgrade will impact our backups, while working with us to figure out the best time to start the process. My support engineer has walked me though so many things, and I like that I can give him remote access and we can work together through a screen share,” he said. “Since ExaGrid support takes care of a lot of the system maintenance, the only thing I need to do is monitor the system— it runs behind the scenes, which frees up a ton of my time.”

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.

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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