Backup Windows 2.5X Shorter, Eliminating Spillover into Workday
OMNI installed ExaGrid systems at its primary and secondary sites that cross-replicate to further protect the practice’s data. Haley backs up in daily incrementals and weekly fulls and is relieved that backup windows no longer affect workday production, as they had done with tape.
“Our backup windows with tape were brutal, sometimes up to 15 hours for a full backup. There were times that I’d get to work in the morning and backup jobs were still going, which affected our ability to get the day started. Now with our ExaGrid system, backups are all done automatically and take just six hours; we set the schedule for our backup jobs and they’re always done before we walk in the building. ExaGrid does what it’s supposed to do and it’s a solid system,” said Haley.
Haley is impressed that ExaGrid’s data deduplication has maximized storage capacity, accommodating a long period of retention. “Even after adding the PACS server, which is a bit of a space hog, we still are able to store all of our data going back the last ten years without having to archive it. Most of what we back up is information on the active directory and the day-to-day data that we might generate through our business applications. We’re a medical practice, so the doctors haven’t wanted to archive because they want the data readily available, and thankfully our ExaGrid system has been able to manage all of that data.”
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).