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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

The Pestalozzi Group Updates Environment with ExaGrid-Veeam Solution

Customer Overview

Founded in 1763, the Pestalozzi Group began as an ironmongery and steel trader in Switzerland. Over time, the family-run company has become a leading solution provider and trading partner with a comprehensive range of quality products. The Pestalozzi Group offers a variety of steel, aluminum, and plastic products, as well as pre-fabricated building materials, plumbing and heating materials, and also provides its customers with transportation, warehousing, and logistics services.

Key Benefits:

  • ExaGrid-Veeam solution improves Pestalozzi’s data protection and disaster recovery options
  • Since upgrading environment, backup windows have been reduced from 59 to 2.5 hours
  • Tests show that restoring the entire environment is much quicker after upgrade; down from days to hours
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ExaGrid’s Secure Backups Offer Greater Data Protection

Prior to using ExaGrid, the Pestalozzi Group backed its data up to a Quantum DXi appliance, using Veeam. The company wanted to increase its data protection by implementing a system with secure backups. Markus Mösch, Pestalozzi’s head of IT infrastructure, found that ExaGrid offered the security the company was looking for. “Our ICT service provider, Keynet, recommended ExaGrid and after a presentation, we decided to replace our Quantum appliance with an ExaGrid system.

We like the security features that ExaGrid provides, and its functionality with Veeam, especially that backups are only accessible from the Veeam server, so if there is a ransomware attack on a network, the ransomware can’t encrypt your backup. We were also impressed that you can run a virtual machine from a backup stored on ExaGrid’s Landing Zone in a disaster recovery situation.”

The data security capabilities in the ExaGrid product line provide a high level of security for data at rest and can help reduce IT drive retirement costs in the data center. All data on the disk drive is encrypted automatically without any action required by users. Encryption and authentication keys are never accessible to outside systems where they can be stolen.

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.

"We like the security features that ExaGrid provides, and its functionality with Veeam, especially that backups are only accessible from the Veeam server, so if there is a ransomware attack on a network, the ransomware can’t encrypt your backup. We were also impressed that you can run a virtual machine from a backup stored on ExaGrid’s Landing Zone in a disaster recovery situation. "

Markus Mösch, Head of IT Infrastructure

Improved Backup Environment Leads to 95% Shorter Backup Windows and 97% Faster Restores

Mösch backs up Pestalozzi’s data in daily incrementals and a weekly full backup, as well as a yearly backup. In addition to updating the backup system, Pestalozzi also upgraded to a 10 GbE network, which replaced the 1GbE network it had used before, maximizing the speed of its backups. “Since updating our network and implementing ExaGrid, a backup of our entire data center has been reduced from 59 hours to just 2.5 hours. It’s a huge improvement!” said Mösch. “We often test restore times and recovering our data center would take over six days with our previous solution, which has been reduced to little more than three hours with our new ExaGrid-Veeam solution. That’s fast!”

Pestalozzi keeps a retention of three months’ worth of backups, as mandated by an internal policy, and Mösch finds that ExaGrid’s data deduplication maximizes storage capacity, so that maintaining the desired retention is never an issue. 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).

ExaGrid’s 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 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.

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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