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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Risoul Upgrades IT Infrastructure, Improving Backup Environment with Secure ExaGrid-Veeam Solution

Customer Overview

With over 40 years of experience in the Mexican market, Risoul’s philosophy is to offer value-added service for its customers. As distributors of leading brands in automation and electrical industries, Risoul offers the best and latest technology products and solutions to its customers. Not only is Risoul committed to high quality products and solutions, but its dedicated staff sets the distributor apart from other organizations in the industrial market.

Key Benefits:

  • Risoul moves to a hyperconverged environment using Nutanix, Veeam, and ExaGrid for better efficiency
  • ExaGrid-Veeam deduplication provides storage savings, allowing for increased retention
  • ExaGrid-Veeam solution works seamlessly, saving staff time on backup management
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Dynamic Duo: ExaGrid and Veeam Chosen for Newly Hyperconverged Environment

The IT staff at Risoul had used Windows Servers to do bare-metal backups on its SAN. The downside of this solution was that if a server failed, that the staff needed to replace it, and then install everything again and then start the backup process over, which was a very time-consuming process. This was not a scalable solution, so the company looked for a new enterprise-level backup solution.

Quanti Solutions, a leading tech vendor and the technological arm of Risoul, recommended the combined solution of ExaGrid and Veeam and set up a demo so that the Risoul team could test the new solution. Following an impressive demo, Risoul implemented the new solution.

"We analyzed Risoul’s environment and proposed several technology improvements, and we recommended ExaGrid and Veeam data protection because they are the best partners, like Batman and Robin. We also proposed that Risoul move to hyperconverged environment, so they implemented Nutanix for efficiency and easy management, which Veeam and ExaGrid support with optimal performance."

Martín Chávez, Chief Marketing Officer, Quanti Solutions

Enterprises can achieve a true end-to-end, seamless storage environment when combining Nutanix, Veeam, and ExaGrid. Nutanix pioneered the hyperconverged infrastructure space, which combines compute, storage and networking into an all-in-one solution for flexible scaling.

The combination of Nutanix, Veeam, and ExaGrid allows organizations to provide high user productivity with the lowest equipment, software, and data center costs with minimal IT intervention. ExaGrid offers a complementary scale-out backup storage architecture, ensuring maximum uptime and lowering the cost of long-term backup retention.

ExaGrid appliances have a network-facing disk-cache Landing Zone Tier where the most recent backups are stored in an undeduplicated format, for fast backup and restore performance. Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing tier called the repository where deduplicated data is stored for longer-term retention. The combination of a non-network facing tier (a virtual air gap) plus delayed deletes with ExaGrid’s Retention Time-Lock feature, and immutable data objects, guards against the backup data being deleted or encrypted.

Improved Backup Performance and Management Saves Time

The IT staff at Risoul back up the company’s data on daily and weekly basis and has been pleased that most backup jobs have been reduced to just minutes, with the longest taking only one hour. In addition, the IT staff find that the new solution has been much easier to manage. “Our IT staff no longer have to worry if a server is going to fail and the intensive process to remedy that, as the ExaGrid-Veeam solution works without any issues, giving us peace of mind that our data is well-protected and available, which allows the staff to focus on other projects,” said Torres.

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 so that an RTO and RPO can be easily met. Available system cycles are utilized to perform deduplication and offsite replication for an optimal recovery point at the disaster recovery site. Once complete, the onsite data is protected and immediately available in its full undeduplicated form for fast restores, VM Instant Recoveries, and tape copies while the offsite data is ready for disaster recovery.

The IT staff at Risoul back up the company’s data on daily and weekly basis and has been pleased that most backup jobs have been reduced to just minutes, with the longest taking only one hour. In addition, the IT staff find that the new solution has been much easier to manage. “Our IT staff no longer have to worry if a server is going to fail and the intensive process to remedy that, as the ExaGrid-Veeam solution works without any issues, giving us peace of mind that our data is well-protected and available, which allows the staff to focus on other projects,” said Torres.

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 so that an RTO and RPO can be easily met. Available system cycles are utilized to perform deduplication and offsite replication for an optimal recovery point at the disaster recovery site. Once complete, the onsite data is protected and immediately available in its full undeduplicated form for fast restores, VM Instant Recoveries, and tape copies while the offsite data is ready for disaster recovery.

"Quanti Solutions is a valued partner of Risoul so there is always a layer of trust regarding the technology solutions that they propose. ExaGrid’s Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery feature was also an important factor in our choice. The data we back up is critical for our business and the clients we serve, and in this day and age with the growing number of ransomware attacks, it is so important to make sure our data is secure. We have been fortunate that we have never faced a ransomware event but were very aware of cybersecurity threats and ExaGrid’s architecture provides us another layer of security."

Aldo Torres, CFO, Risoul

Storage Savings from ExaGrid-Veeam Deduplication Allows for Longer Retention

The previous solution that Risoul used did not have data deduplication capabilities, so when the ExaGrid-Veeam solution was implemented, the IT staff noticed the storage savings that the new solution provides. “We have been able to increase our retention from one month to one year thanks to the greater storage capacity,” said Torres. “Adding deduplication is important because as our business grows, our data will grow, and one of the great values of ExaGrid’s approach is that it provides the storage savings without comprising performance.”

Veeam uses the information from VMware and Hyper-V and provides deduplication on a “per-job” basis, finding the matching areas of all the virtual disks within a backup job and using metadata to reduce the overall footprint of the backup data. Veeam also has a “dedupe friendly” compression setting which further reduces the size of the Veeam backups in a way that allows the ExaGrid system to achieve further deduplication. This approach typically achieves a 2:1 deduplication ratio.

ExaGrid is architected from the ground up to protect virtualized environments and provide deduplication as backups are taken. ExaGrid will achieve up to 5:1 additional deduplication rate. The net result is a combined Veeam and ExaGrid deduplication rate of upwards to 10:1, which greatly reduces the amount of disk storage required.

 

ExaGrid and Veeam

The combination of ExaGrid and Veeam’s industry-leading virtual server data protection solutions allows customers to utilize Veeam Backup & Replication in VMware, vSphere, and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual environments on ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage. This combination provides fast backups and efficient data storage as well as replication to an offsite location for disaster recovery. Customers can use Veeam Backup & Replication’s built-in source-side deduplication in concert with ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage with Adaptive Deduplication to further shrink backups.

About Quanti Solutions

Quanti was born in 2013 with the purpose of creating a safer world by helping companies to enter the digital world in a safe and simplified way. They are a certified partner of the most innovative and leading companies worldwide in cybersecurity, networking, cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure, such as Veeam. Quanti helps companies in three main areas: cybersecurity and awareness, secure and smart networks and infrastructure for digital transformation.

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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