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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Switching to ExaGrid from Data Domain Results in 50% Faster Backups for Ogilvie

Customer Overview

Ogilvie, a premier Canadian law firm, was built in 1920 on a tradition of building relationships and working alongside its clients. Its corporate and commercial lawyers represent businesses of all sizes and sectors, supporting clients in Alberta, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, British Columbia and Saskatchewan while headquartered in downtown Edmonton.

Key Benefits:

  • Switch to ExaGrid resulted in backup window cut in half
  • Ogilvie able to add backups without strain on storage
  • ExaGrid supports more of Veeam’s functionality
  • ExaGrid Support helps Ogilvie IT staff with keeping system upgraded and well-maintained
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Switch from Dell EMC Data Domain to ExaGrid

Ogilvie had been backing up its data to a Dell EMC Data Domain using Veeam. As the Dell hardware aged, the IT team decided to refresh the backup environment. “We decided to look around and see if there were better options than buying a newer Data Domain,” said Brad Esopenko, System Administrator at Ogilvie. “I had learned about ExaGrid during a presentation at a client event that one of our vendors held a few years ago. When we were looking at alternate solutions, I decided to give ExaGrid a closer look. A standout feature to me was the fact that we could spin up backups on the ExaGrid system, which is something we couldn’t do with the Data Domain that we had.”

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.

"Our backups take half the time now, from 16 hours with Data Domain to eight hours using ExaGrid, and it’s been nice to close the backup window a bit. Restoring files is a quick process, too, especially because data doesn’t need to be rehydrated when it’s restored from ExaGrid’s Landing Zone. "

Brad Esopenko, System Administrator

50% Faster Backups and Quick Restores

Esopenko backs up Ogilvie’s data on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis to the ExaGrid system, using Veeam. Since switching to ExaGrid, he has added backups on Saturday and Sunday, and has been impressed that adding backups has not caused a strain on storage capacity. “Our backups take half the time now, from 16 hours with Data Domain to eight hours using ExaGrid, and it’s been nice to close the backup window a bit. Restoring files is a quick process, too, especially because data doesn’t need to be rehydrated when it’s restored from ExaGrid’s Landing Zone,” said Esopenko.

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). Veeam uses the information from VMware and Hyper-V and provides deduplication on a “per-job” basis, finding the matching areas of all the virtual disks within a backup job and using metadata to reduce the overall footprint of the backup data. Veeam also has a “dedupe friendly” compression setting which further reduces the size of the Veeam backups in a way that allows the ExaGrid system to achieve further deduplication. The net result is a combined Veeam and ExaGrid deduplication rate of 6:1 upwards to 10:1, which greatly reduces the amount of disk storage required.

ExaGrid Support Helps Keep System Well-Maintained

Esopenko appreciates the high level of support he receives from ExaGrid. “Our ExaGrid support engineer takes good care of us. I like that we work with one person, who is assigned to our account and knows our environment. They keep an eye on our system and install all the upgrades for us, which is a different experience than we’ve had with our Dell EMC Data Domain hardware. Both ExaGrid and Veeam are great to work with, and we’ve had no problems with the combined solution.”

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. Customer’s never have to repeat themselves to various support staff, and issues get resolved quickly.

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.

 

ExaGrid-Veeam Combined Dedupe

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.

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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