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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

PHC Chooses ExaGrid for Its 24/7 IT Environment

Customer Overview

Partnership Health Plan of California (PHC) is a non-profit community-based health care organization that contracts with the state to administer Medi-Cal benefits through local care providers to ensure recipients have access to high-quality, comprehensive, cost-effective health care. PHC provides quality health care to over 600,000 lives in 14 Northern California counties.

Key Benefits:

  • Short backup windows keep up with hourly backups
  • Deduplication ratios doubled after switch to ExaGrid
  • ‘Amazing’ support provides proactive assistance
  • Straightforward GUI assists with easy backup administration
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Poor Dedupe and Performance Drive Search for Better Solution

Partnership HealthPlan of California (PHC) had been using EVault to back up its data, but that solution had grown frustrating for Karl Santos, PHC’s director of IT/network operations and Jason Bowes, systems administrator, due to the solution’s poor deduplication and storage performance. Santos and Bowes searched for a better solution and considered NAS and Dell EMC Data Domain products, but ultimately chose ExaGrid primarily for its speed and deduplication. “There was no contest, given the way ExaGrid handles deduplication and its storage capabilities,” said Bowes. PHC switched to ExaGrid with Commvault as its backup application.

The ExaGrid system is easy to install and use and works seamlessly with the industry’s leading backup applications so that an organization can retain its investment in its existing backup applications and processes.

"We’re a 24/7 shop. The backup window was always tough for us no matter what, but now we are making it quite easily using ExaGrid. "

Jason Bowes, Systems Administrator

PHC Shortens Backup Window with ExaGrid

PHC backs up hundreds of terabytes of patient data and runs incremental log backups every hour of the day. The organization also runs weekly, monthly, and yearly fulls and must keep the data for seven years.

“We’re a 24/7 shop. The backup window was always tough for us no matter what, but now we are making it quite easily using ExaGrid. We’re beating it by hours compared to when we were using EVault,” said Bowes. Bowes is pleased that the deduplication ratios have doubled with ExaGrid. “At the highest, we’re getting 22:1, which is much better than the 5:1 we experienced with EVault; 10.5:1 is the average ratio achieved, which is excellent.”

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).

Customer Support Ensures Easy System Maintenance

Bowes is pleased with how proactive his ExaGrid customer support engineer is. “My support engineer is amazing! Any time there is an alert, he checks on the system and takes care of the issue. One time, a piece of hardware failed and just as I was sending him a message, I received one from him letting me know that a drive had been sent out and that I should receive it the next day. That was great! He had already handled it before I had a chance to forward him the alert message to find out what was going on. He’s always available, and I love working with him.”

In addition to working with his assigned customer support engineer, Bowes likes how easy it is to check on the health of the system. “It’s easy to move around inside the GUI, and it’s not overly complicated. I like to use the GUI, but I don’t have to very often – the system usually just works.”

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.

Unique Architecture Provides Investment Protection

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.

ExaGrid and Commvault

The Commvault backup application has a level of data deduplication. ExaGrid can ingest Commvault deduplicated data and increase the level of data deduplication by 3X providing a combined deduplication ratio of 15;1, significantly reducing the amount and cost of storage up front and over time. Instead of performing data at rest encryption in Commvault ExaGrid, performs this function in the disk drives in nanoseconds. This approach provides an increase of 20% to 30% for Commvault environments while greatly reducing storage costs.

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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