Pareto Securities

Pareto Securities Replaces HPE StoreOnce, Maximizes Veeam’s Feature Set with ExaGrid

Customer Overview

Pareto Securities is an independent, full-service investment bank with a leading position in the Nordic capital markets and a strong international presence within the oil, offshore, shipping, and natural resources sectors. Headquartered in Oslo, Norway, the company has more than 500 employees across the Nordic countries, United Kingdom, France, Germany, USA, Singapore, and Australia.

Key Benefits:

Using ExaGrid and Veeam, restores are as quick as rebooting a VM
Backup window for daily incrementals has been reduced from days to minutes
Pareto can keep up with data growth thanks to ExaGrid’s scalability

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HPE StoreOnce Couldn’t Keep Up

Pareto Securities had been using HPE StoreOnce, with Veeam as its backup application. Truls Klausen, system administrator at Pareto Securities, was frustrated with the long backup windows experienced and with the limitations of that solution to keep up with data growth. Klausen started looking into other options. “We needed something that could scale the way we scaled Veeam. We tried to add more disks to the old storage system but that only slowed things down, because the controllers had to push more data, and there was always another bottleneck to fight. We needed something that could expand compute and networking along with disk.” Klausen considered a few options, including Commvault and purchasing backup as a service. An IT services company that Pareto works with recommended using ExaGrid with Veeam, which is the solution that was ultimately chosen.

"It’s not really possible to use [the great features in Veeam] with a traditional dedupe appliance, but with ExaGrid’s landing zone we can really make use of them. Now, we can use Veeam to its full potential. We couldn’t do that before. "

Truls Klausen, System Administrator

Switching to ExaGrid Maximizes Veeam Features

Klausen has found that switching to ExaGrid has optimized his use of Veeam. “We have used Veeam for several years, and we had tried to use the functions in Veeam that make the software great like Instant Restore and SureBackup. It’s not really possible to use those with a traditional dedupe appliance, but with ExaGrid’s Landing Zone, we can really make use of those great features in Veeam. Now, we can use Veeam to its full potential. We couldn’t do that before,” said Klausen.

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. 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.

Backups and Restores Take Minutes vs. Days

Klausen has noticed a significant reduction of the backup window since installing ExaGrid. “Now backups are as short as they should be. An incremental backup only takes minutes, which is great! Before we had ExaGrid, backups would run all day!”

Klausen is impressed with how quickly data can be restored using ExaGrid. “Restores are like night and day. Before using ExaGrid, restores could take several hours. As part of the proof of concept with ExaGrid, I tried the same restore that had taken hours to complete some weeks earlier, and it was down to minutes. We can now use Veeam Instant Restore and Instant VM Recovery, which makes the restore process even shorter. In the time it takes to reboot the VM, we can be back in production,” he said.

High Retention Calls for Adaptive Deduplication

Deduplication is important to Pareto, as they have a ten-year retention of data that includes monthly and yearly backups. “We are backing up a virtual environment using VMware with all kinds of data: file servers, Exchange and SQL servers, application servers – there’s a lot of data,” said Klausen.

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.

Scalability Key to Long-Term Planning

Pareto hasn’t needed to scale out its ExaGrid system yet but plans to do so in the future. Klausen appreciates the scalable architecture of the system. “Now, I am actually looking forward to scaling out. It’s as easy as adding a new appliance.” ExaGrid’s award-winning scale-out architecture provides customers with a fixed length backup window regardless of data growth. Its unique disk-cache Landing Zone allows for the fastest backups and retains the most recent backup in its full undeduplicated form, enabling the fastest restores.

ExaGrid’s appliance models can be mixed and matched into a single scale-out system allowing a full backup of up to 2.7PB with a combined ingest rate of 488TB/hr, in a single system. The appliances automatically join the scale-out system. Each appliance includes the appropriate amount of processor, memory, disk, and bandwidth for the data size. By adding compute with capacity, the backup window remains fixed in length as the data grows. Automatic load balancing across all repositories allows for full utilization of all appliances. Data is deduplicated into an offline repository, and additionally, data is globally deduplicated across all repositories. This combination of capabilities in a turnkey appliance makes the ExaGrid system easy to install, manage, and scale. ExaGrid’s architecture provides lifetime value and investment protection that no other architecture can match.

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