Backup Window Decreased from One Day to One Hour
After installing the combined solution of ExaGrid and Veeam, Smits gradually transitioned the backup jobs from the existing TSM solution, and was pleased with the results. “We started adding more Veeam backups, especially for our virtualized environments, and eventually the Veeam backups outnumbered TSM. Veeam, combined with ExaGrid is modular, scalable, and flexible. This was a no-brainer decision for our team.”
Radboud Universiteit has a straightforward backup schedule and a 30-day retention of daily backups. Since switching to ExaGrid and Veeam, backups are finished within a couple of hours, leaving plenty of time for maintenance at night.
“It had been getting quite troublesome to get all the backups finished when we were using TSM. With Veeam and ExaGrid, our backup window decreased from 24 hours to just over an hour per job. Restoring data is also very easy and no longer creates bottlenecks in our environment, and that is something I really like about the whole solution,” said Smits.
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 if 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.