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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Rightmove Relies on ExaGrid to Protect Its Oracle Data

Customer Overview

Rightmove is the UK’s number one property portal and the UK’s largest property marketplace. The company brings the UK’s largest and most engaged property audience and the largest inventory of properties together in one place. Rightmove’s aim is to empower the UK’s decisions around property and its sophisticated, yet simple, property search platform makes it easy for home hunters to find their ‘happy.

Key Benefits:

  • Rightmove chose ExaGrid for its ease of use and deduplication
  • ExaGrid supports Oracle RMAN Channels, no additional backup application needed
  • Data is backed up quickly to ExaGrid’s Landing Zone and easily restored
  • Less staff overtime needed for backup management, storage capacity easy to track in GUI
  • ‘Amazing’ ExaGrid support engineer is helpful with any questions or issues
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ExaGrid Increases Data Protection for Oracle Databases

The IT staff at Rightmove had been taking storage-level snapshots of its Oracle databases at its data centers. While the snapshots provided some data restoration options, the IT staff decided to look into solutions that would provide Oracle RMAN backups for greater data protection.

“We learned about ExaGrid at a conference we went to in London,” said Sam Wagner, Rightmove’s database manager. “We were very impressed with the simplicity of the ExaGrid solution and we invited the ExaGrid team to the office to present to our staff. We ended up doing a proof-of-concept (POC) and backed up a number of our databases and played with the RMAN configuration to make sure we would get a good dedupe ratio, which we did. The ExaGrid team did a great job of sizing our ExaGrid systems correctly, so we haven’t had any storage capacity issues.”

Rightmove installed an ExaGrid system at each of its data centers and each replicates data to a second site for increased data protection ExaGrid eliminates the need for expensive primary storage for database backups without affecting the ability to use familiar built-in database protection tools. While built-in database tools for Oracle and SQL provide the basic capability to back up and recover these mission-critical databases, adding an ExaGrid system allows database administrators to gain control over their data protection needs at a lower cost and with less complexity. ExaGrid’s support of Oracle RMAN Channels provides the fastest backup and fastest restore performance for databases of any size.

Quick Backups and Restores

The Database Team backs up Rightmove’s databases in daily incrementals as well as weekly fulls, which are then retained on a monthly and yearly retention policy. “Our backup jobs are very quick and we never have any issues or delays. We’ve also been able to migrate our databases to different operating systems by restoring them from the ExaGrid system, and we’ve been happy with the performance.”

The DBAs are pleased with the data deduplication that ExaGrid provides. “Our dedupe ratios are around 20:1. The fact that the dedupe is so good makes it easy to replicate our backups between the data centers. If we were replicating a full database, it would just be too much—and unnecessary as well. That enables us to replicate just the changes that are going across.”

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).

"The ExaGrid system just works; once it’s set up there isn’t much to work on, it looks after itself, so it is quite pain-free. "

Sam Wagner, Database Manager

Reliable System with ‘Amazing’ Customer Support

The DBA Team appreciates ExaGrid’s approach to customer support, to work with an assigned support engineer. “From the beginning, POC to the installation, and then with any small issue we’ve had, our ExaGrid support engineer has helped us the whole way. He’s been absolutely amazing! It’s great to know that we can call him if anything happens. He’s knowledgeable and patient, and gets back to us promptly. It’s given us peace of mind. The entire ExaGrid team is great, even the sales rep that had presented to us called to check in after installation to make sure everything was working as expected and to ask if we need anything.

It’s a very positive experience to work with them.” In addition, they find that backups are reliable and easy to manage using ExaGrid. “Now that we use ExaGrid, there’s less to worry about. All of our backups are working well, and we have a year’s worth of backups to restore from, should we need to. There’s not a huge staff overhead in terms of managing our backups, we’re able to almost forget about it. The ExaGrid GUI simplifies managing our storage capacity, as it’s clear to see how much space is being used and how much is free. The ExaGrid system just works; once it’s set up there isn’t much to work on, it looks after itself, so it is quite pain-free.”

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. Customer’s never have to repeat themselves to various support staff, and issues get resolved quickly.

Scale-Out Architecture Provides Lifetime Value

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.

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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