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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid-Veeam Solution Provides Data Protection for Nurol Group

 

Nurol Group, comprised of more than 35 companies, has become one of the preeminent businesses in Turkey today. The company’s history spans more than half a century, and its business activities are focused in the areas of construction, defense, energy, mining, tourism, finance, and various service sectors. Nurol Group operates in Turkey in addition to various countries throughout the world, and employees more than 15,000 people across the globe.

Key Benefits:

  • ExaGrid’s Retention Time-Lock gives IT team confidence that data can be recovered in the event of a ransomware attack
  • ExaGrid-Veeam combined dedupe accommodates Nurol’s retention requirements
  • ExaGrid provides proactive customer support, reducing time spent on backup management
  • ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture key to planning for future growth
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"It is IT’s responsibility to make sure that we are prepared for anything that can happen with our production data. We try to protect it, but in the worst-case scenario, we must be able to recover our data from backups. So, our backups must be very safe and protected. We know that if anything happens, we can restore our data from ExaGrid."

Anil Bostancioglu, Network & Cybersecurity Manager

ExaGrid Helps Nurol Group Meet ISO-27001 Standards

As the Network and Cybersecurity Manager for Nurol Group, Anil Bostancioglu, has amassed a great deal of experience over his 17-year tenure. He’s also witnessed a transformation in the management of the company’s backup storage since the introduction of ExaGrid into the production environment.

“Before ExaGrid, we were using QNAP NAS devices. The devices were old, and we had multiple devices that we were trying to manage separately,” said Bostancioglu. “It was a budget-friendly solution, but it lagged in both backup and restore performance.” The company’s outdated NAS solution was very slow, and worse yet, it was unreliable. “The backup jobs took a long time, and we couldn’t schedule the jobs easily. We needed to do backups overnight because they were taking hours.”

Nurol Group is a multi-national company with business operations in industries including defense, tourism, construction, energy, and mining. They operate in regulated industries and have set strict policies for their back-up, retention, and data security. Additionally, having ISO-27001 certification, which provides an international benchmark for implementing, managing, and maintaining information security within a company, requires them to adhere to certain rules and standards.

“It is IT’s responsibility to make sure that we are prepared for anything that can happen with our production data. We try to protect it, but in the worst-case scenario, we must be able to recover our data from backups. So, our backups must be very safe and protected. We know that if anything happens, we can restore our data from ExaGrid,” said Bostancioglu.

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 Stood Out as the Clear Choice for Nurol Group

The company conducted a Proof of Concept (POC) during their evaluation process. “We heard a lot of stories about hackers attacking the backups and deleting them and deleting or encrypting the production storage. If that happens, then you must pay the price,” said Bostancioglu. “We needed to prepare ourselves in case we ever faced a ransomware attack, and learned that ExaGrid offers a ransomware recovery solution from just a single appliance. Other vendors’ solutions required multiple devices and we just didn’t want that architecture when we could use a single ExaGrid appliance.”

ExaGrid appliances have a network-facing disk-cache Landing Zone where the most recent backups are stored in an undeduplicated format for fast backup and restore performance. Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing tier called the Repository Tier, for longer-term retention. ExaGrid’s unique architecture and features provide comprehensive security including Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery (RTL), and through the combination of a non-network-facing tier (tiered air gap), a delayed delete policy, and immutable data objects, backup data is protected from being deleted or encrypted. ExaGrid’s offline tier is ready for recovery in the event of an attack.

Deduplication Key to Managing Retention Requirements

Nurol’s IT team backs up 300TB of data on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis. The team diligently maintains retention policies that require keeping 14 dailies, 16 weeklies and 12 monthly backups to restore from, which spurred Bostancioglu to seek a more sophisticated, enterprise backup storage appliance that could integrate seamlessly with their existing backup application, Veeam. Additionally, since Nurol didn’t have a deduplication option in their legacy system, it was an opportunity for an IT transformation that would set the company up for future growth and expansion.

“Deduplication was a big factor in the selection of ExaGrid because if you don’t have enough space to back up, you have to deduplicate the data, or you have to lower your retention and we didn’t want to do that,” Bostancioglu explains. “We tested different appliances from HPE and Dell Data Domain and found that ExaGrid provided better deduplication than the others.”

Bostancioglu also appreciated that ExaGrid support explained the best practices for using ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage with Veeam to get the best deduplication and optimize performance.

The combination of ExaGrid and Veeam can dramatically increase dedupe ratios. 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.

Well-Supported System Easy to Scale as Data Grows

Bostancioglu feels that the communication between his team and their assigned ExaGrid support engineer is very good and that response times are fast. He appreciates the proactive nature of the support, especially since it saves time for his team.

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.

As the company continues on a path of growth and expansion, Bostancioglu knows that his responsibilities and the company’s backup storage requirements will also increase. That inevitability is another reason why the company chose ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage. “The scale-out architecture was a good feature for us, because as we grow, we can just add a new ExaGrid appliance to our existing system so we can scale as needed,” he said.

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.

ExaGrid and Veeam

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.

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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