Oberg Industries

Oberg Industries Streamlines Backups, Improves Disaster Recovery with ExaGrid

Customer Overview

Headquartered just northeast of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Oberg Industries is a diversified US-based manufacturer with over 700 employees specializing in the production of advanced, precision machined or stamped metal components and precision tooling. Oberg’s manufacturing footprint includes five facilities, totaling nearly 450,000 sq. ft., in Pennsylvania, Chicago, and Connecticut and is a strategic contract manufacturing partner for leading companies in the Aerospace, Automotive, Consumer/Industrial Products, Defense, Energy, Construction and Housing, Medical Device, Metal Packaging and Munitions markets. Oberg Industries got its start in 1948.

Key Benefits:

ExaGrid’s management interface was one of the deciding factors
Restores are significantly faster and far less labor intensive
Having the ExaGrid system in place helps team sleep better at night
Seamless integration with Veritas NetBackup

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Need for Faster Backups and Restores, Better Disaster Recovery

Oberg’s IT staff had long been frustrated by slow backups and restores. The company had been using tape to protect its data but had difficulty managing it at remote sites. At its main datacenter, nightly backups often extended beyond the company’s backup window and the IT staff found that restoring data from tape was slow and time consuming.

“We decided to move to a disk-based backup system in an effort to reduce our reliance on tape, shorten our backup times and to improve our ability to recover from a disaster. We also wanted the ability to replicate data from our remote locations to our own datacenter for safekeeping,” said Stephen Hill, infrastructure manager at Oberg Industries. “We looked at systems from HP, Dell EMC Data Domain and ExaGrid and chose ExaGrid because it gave us everything we were looking for in a cost-effective package.”

"ExaGrid’s support team has been extremely helpful and proactive. For example, our support engineer called one day and suggested we upgrade the firmware for all our units. He initiated the process for the upgrade and then I installed the physical units. He then came in remotely and helped us complete the installation and stayed with it until we were all sure that everything was up and running well. We were very impressed. "

Stephen Hill, Infrastructure Manager

ExaGrid Provides Data Replication from Remote Sites, Data Deduplication to Maximize Disk Space and Speed Transmission

Oberg Industries installed a primary ExaGrid unit in its Pittsburgh datacenter and additional units at its sites in Mexico and Costa Rica. The ExaGrid systems work in conjunction with Oberg’s existing backup application, Veritas NetBackup, and data is automatically replicated from the Mexico and Costa Rica sites to Pittsburgh each night in case it is needed for disaster recovery.

“Deploying the ExaGrid systems in all three sites has significantly improved our ability to recover from a disaster and it also eliminated a whole host of other issues. For example, we no longer have to remind people in our remote locations to change tapes because everything is now automated. It has really streamlined our processes and we’re more confident that our backups are being completed correctly each and every night,” said Hill. “Costa

Ricais also vulnerable to earthquakes and other natural disasters. It’s been a tremendous asset to me to not have to worry about remote backups. It really gives me peace of mind.” Hill said that ExaGrid’s post-process data deduplication helps reduce the amount of data stored and maximize disk space. The company backs up a total of nearly 2.3 TB in its Pennsylvania datacenter, with a large amount of CAD/CAM data as well as other data, including Microsoft Office information.

“Data deduplication was a mandatory requirement for us, and we haven’t been disappointed by the ExaGrid system. It not only helps us maximize disk space on the ExaGrid units, but it also helps with the transmission speed between systems because only the changed data is moved between sites each night,” said Hill.

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).

Fast Backups, Restores

Hill said that since installing the ExaGrid system, the company can now complete its backups each and every night within its backup windows and restores are also significantly faster and far less labor-intensive.

“The ExaGrid system has really streamlined our backups,” Hill said. “We’re able to finish our backups with time to spare and we don’t have to deal with tape. We really like the fast restores. Restoring data from our tape library was a very slow process and very manual. We can now complete a restore with just a few keystrokes. It’s wonderful.”

Easy Setup, Industry-leading Customer Support

Hill said that the ExaGrid system was easy to set up and it is easy to maintain and administer. He said that he especially likes ExaGrid’s management interface. “ExaGrid’s management interface was one of the deciding factors for us in choosing the system,” he said. “It’s very intuitive and easy to use and it took us almost no time at all to get up to speed with the system.”

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’s support team has been extremely helpful and proactive. For example, our support engineer called one day and suggested we upgrade the firmware for all our units. He initiated the process for the upgrade and then I installed the physical units. He then came in remotely and helped us complete the install and stayed with us until we were all sure that everything was up and running well. We were very impressed,” said Hill.

Scale-out Architecture Delivers Smooth Scalability

As Oberg’s backup needs grow, the ExaGrid system can scale easily to meet increased demands. 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.

“We’ve been very pleased with the ExaGrid system. It’s so nice to have our data automatically replicated every night and we don’t have to worry about our data in the event of a disaster. Having the ExaGrid system in place helps me sleep better at night,” he said.

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.

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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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story