It’s Not ‘Witchcraft’ – Backups up to 97% Quicker and Data Restored in Minutes
Since switching to ExaGrid and Veeam, Villani has noticed a huge reduction in the backup window, which has had a positive impact on users throughout the company. “Our weekly full backup used to run from Saturday morning at 2:00 a.m. all the way into Tuesday afternoon. Every Monday, users would be calling in and asking why the system was so slow. Now, our weekly full takes just three hours! We thought something was broken the first time we used ExaGrid, so we called our support engineer who confirmed that everything ran correctly. It’s totally incredible!”
Villani found that daily incrementals had a much shorter backup window, too. He used to stagger daily backups so that users wouldn’t be impacted, and the daily incrementals would take up to 22 hours using Veritas NetBackup and tape. Since switching to ExaGrid and Veeam, daily incrementals have been reduced by 97% and are finished in about 30 minutes. In addition to shorter backup windows, Villani has been impressed with how quickly data is restored using the combination of ExaGrid and Veeam. “When we were using NetBackup and tape, it would take about a week to restore an Exchange server. It’s quite a process to go through all of those tapes, find the right location, read the data, move it, and so on. I run test restores periodically, and I was able to bring up the entire Exchange server in 20 minutes using ExaGrid and Veeam.
“As far as file restores, there are some users who often delete files and then realize later that they need those files back. It would take four hours for me to restore a simple file or a spreadsheet, and that was too long for most users to wait. Now, I can find the file, open it to make sure it’s the right one, and send it to the user in minutes – they look at me like I’m performing witchcraft!”
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 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.