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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Plastipak Gains Faster Backups and Restores with ExaGrid

Customer Overview

Plastipak Packaging, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Plastipak Holdings, Inc., is a world leader in the design and manufacture of high-quality, rigid plastic containers for the food, beverage, and consumer products industries. Plastipak is also a leading innovator in the packaging industry, having been awarded over 500 United States patents for its state-of-the-art package designs and manufacturing processes. Plastipak operates more than 40 sites in the United States, South America and Europe, with a total of over 6,500 employees. Its customers include some of the world’s most respected and recognized consumer brands. Plastipak is also a leading innovator in the packaging industry, holding more than 420 United States patents for its state-of-the-art package designs and manufacturing processes. In addition, Plastipak licenses various packaging technologies around the world. Plastipak was founded in 1967 and is headquartered in Plymouth, Michigan.

Key Benefits:

  • 30:1 deduplication ratio
  • Time and cost savings realized by no longer using tape
  • Reduced backup window from 8 hours to under 2 hours
  • Better data security with ExaGrid not possible with tape
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Cost-effective Tiered Backup Storage Eliminates Long Backups and Tape Management Issues

Because Plastipak Packaging is a fast-growing organization with manufacturing sites worldwide, it’s absolutely critical that its IT operations be designed for peak efficiency. The firm’s manufacturing facility in Luxembourg houses its European datacenter, where its IT staff was struggling to keep up with routine backups using a tape library. Tired of long backup windows and managing tape, Plastipak began looking for a new solution and chose ExaGrid.

“We considered purchasing a new tape library to solve some of our backup problems and then realized that we could buy the ExaGrid system for about the same cost. Disk-based backup is far superior to tape and we’ll save even more money over time because we’ll eliminate ongoing tape expenses,” said Jon Mayled, manager of international IT operations at Plastipak. “In addition, we were able to easily integrate the ExaGrid system into our environment and leverage our existing backup application.”

The ExaGrid system is located in Plastipak’s datacenter in Luxembourg and works with the company’s backup application, Veritas Backup Exec. Plastipak backs up manufacturing, financial and other business data from the Luxembourg plant onto the ExaGrid by performing full backups each weekend and incremental backups each night. Prior to installing the ExaGrid system, the company performed full backups to tape each evening. Daily backups took in excess of eight hours to complete, and with continued data growth the window required to complete the backup was continually shrinking. The introduction of the ExaGrid solution reduced these daily backup times to two hours and has given Plastipak the ability to back up the ExaGrid appliance to tape each week for ‘off site’ disaster recovery purposes.

"ExaGrid really does eliminate all the problems associated with tape, including long backup windows, difficult restore processes and the day-to-day tape management. It’s a very simple, clean way to protect valuable data at a price point comparable to tape. "

Jon Mayled, Manager, International IT Operations

30:1 Data Deduplication Increases Retention

ExaGrid incorporates data deduplication technology to reduce the amount of information stored and the system is currently achieving nearly 30:1 data deduplication. Plastipak is able to keep 60 days of backups on the system with room for growth.

“We are amazed at ExaGrid’s data deduplication technology,” said Mayled. “We are able to keep two months of data on the system so we can be ready for restores at any time. With tape, restores were a lengthy process but they are nearly instantaneous with ExaGrid.

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).

As Plastipak’s data grows, the ExaGrid system an easily be expanded to handle additional data. The ExaGrid system can easily scale to accommodate data growth. ExaGrid’s software makes the system highly scalable – appliances of any size or age can be mixed and matched in a single system. A single scale-out system can take in up to a 2.7PB full backup plus retention at an ingest rate of up to 488TB per hour.

“I’ve worked for Plastipak for 15 years and I’ve been through numerous tape drives. Over the years I’ve experienced many problems with tape and tape drive failures, particularly in disaster recovery moments,” said Mayled. “ExaGrid really does eliminate all the problems associated with backups, including long backup windows, difficult restore processes and the day-to-day management of tape. It’s a very simple, clean way to protect valuable data at a price point comparable to tape.”

ExaGrid and Veritas Backup Exec

Veritas Backup Exec provides cost-effective, high-performance backup and recovery – including continuous data protection for Microsoft Exchange servers, Microsoft SQL servers, file servers, and workstations. High performance agents and options provide fast, flexible, granular protection and scalable management of local and remote server backups. Organizations using Veritas Backup Exec can look to ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage for nightly backups. ExaGrid sits behind existing backup applications, such as Veritas Backup Exec, providing faster and more reliable backups and restores. In a network running Veritas Backup Exec, using ExaGrid is as easy as pointing existing backup jobs at a NAS share on the ExaGrid system. Backup jobs are sent directly from the backup application to ExaGrid for backup to disk.

Intelligent Data Protection

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).

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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