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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Rio Hondo College Learns About Faster Backups, Increased Retention with ExaGrid

Customer Overview

Nestled in the hills above Whittier, the District was created in 1960. Rio Hondo College, located in Southeast Los Angeles County enrolls over 20,000 students each semester. Rio Hondo’s educational programs prepare students for transfer to four-year colleges and universities, grant two-year degrees in a number of specialties, issue certificates in technical or professional fields, provide contract training for employer workforces, and offer community service classes in subjects ranging from computer skills to cultural event fieldtrips. The college graduates close to 600 students every year, awarding two-year, Associate of Arts/Sciences degrees and nearly 500 specialty certificates.

Key Benefits:

  • Simple scalability accommodates long-term future growth
  • 50% reduction in backup window
  • Extremely efficient in reducing data
  • Seamless integration with Commvault
  • Knowledgeable support ensure easy set-up
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Growing Amounts of Data Leads to Frustration

Rio Hondo had been backing up its data to disk for over a year. Moving from tape backups to disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) gave the college better backups and restores and reduced its reliance on tape, but as Rio Hondo’s data grew, its IT staff struggled with retention. Without data deduplication, the D2D2T solution could only hold two days worth of backups before it had to be offloaded to tape.

Rio Hondo’s IT staff had been researching new technology solutions for its student records system and was working with other colleges and universities to get recommendations. In doing their research, the IT staff discovered that another college had solved similar D2D2T challenges with ExaGrid.

“We liked the speed and convenience of backing up to disk, but we needed a solution that offered data reduction so that we could keep more data locally on the system,” said Van Vuong, network specialist at Rio Hondo College. “It was clear to us that the ExaGrid system was the ideal solution for our backup problems and it came highly recommended. The ExaGrid has the data reduction we were looking for along with the scalability we need to accommodate future growth.”

"The ExaGrid system is very well integrated with Commvault and they work together seamlessly. In addition, the ExaGrid customer support staff is not only knowledgeable about their own product, but they understand Commvault as well. Integration is often the most difficult part of setting up a new system, but ExaGrid’s customer support knew exactly how to configure the system so that we were up and running quickly. "

Van Vuong, Network Specialist

High Marks for ExaGrid-Commvault Combination

Rio Hondo purchased an ExaGrid disk-based backup system to back up nearly 40 servers, including those used by various academic departments, accounting and contract management offices, and financial aid offices. At the recommendation of the IT staff at the other college, Rio Hondo also chose Commvault as its new backup application.

“The ExaGrid system is very well integrated with Commvault and they work together seamlessly,” said Vuong. “In addition, the ExaGrid customer support staff is not only knowledgeable about their own system, but they understand Commvault as well. Integration is often the most difficult part of setting up a new system, but ExaGrid’s customer support knew exactly how to configure the system so that we were up and running quickly.”

Data Deduplication Delivers Increased Retention, 50 Percent Reduction in Backup Window

Rio Hondo is now able to keep four weeks of backups on its ExaGrid system. Every time the system is backed up to tape – the tapes are sent to a safe on campus. “Having so many backups available on the ExaGrid is convenient,” said Vuong.  “If one of our users loses a document we don’t have to waste time going back through tapes to restore the data.”

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).

Since installing the ExaGrid system, Rio Hondo has experienced a 50 percent reduction in its backup window. Weekly full backups that took 24 hours using D2D2T now take 12 hours to complete, and nightly differential backups have been reduced from eight hours to four hours.

Easy Scalability

Scalability is also important because Rio Hondo’s data has grown so quickly in the past. ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture provides easy scalability, so the system can grow as Rio Hondo’s backup requirements grow. When plugged into a switch, additional ExaGrid systems virtualize into one another, appearing as a single system to the backup server, and load balancing of all data across servers is automatic.

“Because our data will only continue to grow, it’s nice to know that we can easily scale our ExaGrid system simply by adding additional units,” said Vuong. “The ExaGrid has been extremely efficient at reducing our data and we have a lot of room on our system, but ExaGrid’s easy scalability ensures that we have a backup strategy for the long run.”

ExaGrid and Commvault

The Commvault backup application has a level of data deduplication. ExaGrid can ingest Commvault deduplicated data and increase the level of data deduplication by 3X providing a combined deduplication ratio of 15;1, significantly reducing the amount and cost of storage up front and over time. Instead of performing data at rest encryption in Commvault ExaGrid, performs this function in the disk drives in nanoseconds. This approach provides an increase of 20% to 30% for Commvault environments while greatly reducing storage costs.

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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