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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid-Veeam Solution Provides RDV Corporation with 66% Shorter Backups and ‘Phenomenal’ Restore Speed

Customer Overview

RDV Corporation is a family office that was founded in 1991. We are located in the vibrant heart of downtown Grand Rapids, MI. RDV Staffing provides domestic, household and property related positions predominantly in West Michigan. Ottawa Avenue Private Capital, LLC, an affiliate of RDV Corporation, manages an alternative asset portfolio that specializes in private equity.

Key Benefits:

  • ExaGrid supports RDV Corporation’s existing technology; Veeam for backup and Zerto for real-time DR
  • ExaGrid-Veeam solution reduces backup windows and restores data at ‘phenomenal’ speed
  • ExaGrid support assists RDV Corporation with re-architecting site, ensuring no data loss during the major transition
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ExaGrid-Veeam Chosen as Optimal Backup Solution

RDV Corporation had used Dell EMC Avamar as its backup solution, and the IT team found Avamar difficult to use. “We were using a six-node Avamar grid at both our primary site and our disaster recovery location. Avamar was not a very intuitive system to use, especially when it came to restoring data. I would open up support tickets on a weekly basis, and it felt like a part-time job just working though issues with Dell EMC support,” said Erik Gilreath, senior systems engineer at RDV Corporation.

RDV Corporation decided to switch its backup solution, using Veeam to back up data to a Tegile array, but that did not deliver the results the IT team hoped for. “The Tegile array couldn’t handle the throughputs we needed and wanted. We ended up looking for other solutions, such as Dell EMC Data Domain, but a colleague of ours had experienced issues with that product. Our vendor suggested ExaGrid, and we were impressed with its Landing Zone feature, and the fact that it offered competitive deduplication compared with Data Domain, while also providing quick restores. ExaGrid offers the best of both worlds, in terms of providing quickly-restorable data and maximizing long-term retention storage,” said Gilreath.

"Our vendor suggested ExaGrid, and we were impressed with its Landing Zone feature, and the fact that it offered competitive deduplication compared with Data Domain, while also providing quick restores. ExaGrid offers the best of both worlds, in terms of providing quickly-restorable data and maximizing long-term retention storage. "

Erik Gilreath, Senior Systems Engineer

Backup Windows 66% Shorter After Switch to ExaGrid

Since installing ExaGrid systems at the primary site and disaster recovery (DR) site, the IT team has found that backing up and restoring data has become an easy and straightforward process. RDV Corporation’s data consists of SQL, SharePoint, Exchange, CRM, and general file servers. “Our Exchange environment in particular is rather large, as there’s no retention policy around email,” said Joe Wastchke, senior systems engineer. The IT team is impressed with how short the backup windows are since switching to ExaGrid.

“We back up our data in daily incrementals and a weekly synthetic full. We assign our backup jobs by application and most of our backup windows are thirty minutes or less. Backing up our entire environment takes three hours. That’s a huge improvement compared with Avamar, as backing up our environment took up to nine hours with that solution. We were able to store a good deal of data on it, but it wasn’t as efficient,” said Gilreath.

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).

Time is Money: ExaGrid Provides Quick Restores

The IT team at RDV Corporation has been pleased with how quickly data is restored from the ExaGrid-Veeam solution. “The restore speed from our ExaGrid system has been phenomenal! I had to restore an entire server recently and it only took three minutes,” said Gilreath. “To restore a server from Avamar was more complicated and after working through the menus to find the data, the process took at least ten minutes, which isn’t terrible, but it’s much simpler and quicker using ExaGrid and Veeam. Recently, some of our SharePoint developers were working in our IT environment at the same time we were restoring data. With the restore process being so quick, they didn’t have to wait to pull up a production SharePoint environment,” said Wastchke. “Since the developers were consultants, time was money, and we didn’t need to lose any,” added Gilreath

ExaGrid-Veeam Deduplication Key to Retention

As RDV Corporation keeps its backups for over a year, retention space is important, and data deduplication maximizes storage capacity. Gilreath finds ExaGrid’s flexible approach to storage is also helpful in maintaining retention. “One of my favorite features about ExaGrid is that we can fine-tune it to adjust to our storage capacity by adjusting how much space is used by the landing zone versus the retention repository, allowing us to maximize what is important to us. Our DR location has fewer servers to backup, so we have a relatively small landing zone to maximize the amount of long-term retention space available.”

Veeam uses changed block tracking to perform a level of data deduplication. ExaGrid allows Veeam deduplication and Veeam dedupe-friendly compression to stay on. ExaGrid will increase Veeam’s deduplication by a factor of about 7:1 to a total combined deduplication ratio of 14:1, reducing the storage required and saving on storage costs up front and over time.

ExaGrid Support Assists with Re-Architecting Production Site

Recently, the IT team at RDV Corporation has undergone a major project, moving its production site to a new location, and they appreciate the help they have received from their ExaGrid support engineer during the transition. “We use Zerto to replicate our data between sites. While we were moving our production site to a colo facility, our ExaGrid support engineer was instrumental in making sure the systems reset and integrated into the other site. We had reached out to our engineer in the beginning and explained our vision of what the process should be, and he took the reins on setting up the ExaGrid systems for backup and replication,” said Wastchke. “We had to re-architect the site, which had only been backing up a small number of servers in the past, to receive the majority of the backups and replicate them, and we needed to make this transition without losing any data. Our ExaGrid support engineer helped us to design the site to ensure it was able to accomplish what we needed,” added Gilreath.

“I appreciate how proactive our support engineer is. In addition to helping me with moving our production site, he also reached out recently to make upgrades to our ExaGrid systems,” said Wastchke.

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.

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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