ExaGrid Simplifies Multi-Site Replication
Page has over 300TB of data to back up, and much of it is large files and unstructured data. “We’re an architecture and engineering firm, so we have a lot of architectural files, drawings, design concepts, animations, and 3D rendered images of our designs. These files tend to be quite large, and we find ourselves in an environment where each office needs to be very close to their data. We’re backing up many VMs across multiple sites, and that had been the crux of the problem as it added a level of complexity,” explained Karl.
Karl had tried different storage options for Page’s smaller offices, including cloud storage, but found that ExaGrid is more efficient and cost-effective. “In our smaller offices, we had initially tried using a cloud-based repository for Veeam. It was very easy to set up and use but we quickly filled up 30TB of storage, which was more costly when we compared it to ExaGrid storage. We were able to move away from the cloud-based repository because of ExaGrid’s ability to take that data across our WAN, ingest it and synthesize full backups pretty easily for us,” he said.
Page installed an ExaGrid system at its primary site which receives replicated data from its smaller offices and also replicates data to an offsite ExaGrid system for disaster recovery. Karl was impressed with ExaGrid’s replication during the POC as that had been a struggle using the previous solution. “We tried to implement replication with various backup solutions, but it wasn’t able to keep up with the replica data. When we did get it working, it was on expensive enterprise tier storage, so that was a very costly setup. One of the reasons we were drawn to ExaGrid was its ability to replicate our large VMs across our sites on storage that’s not nearly as expensive as our production tier,” he said. “It’s much easier to replicate data using ExaGrid. We’re able to replicate backup data from our smaller sites to one of the existing ExaGrid systems at our larger offices.”