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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

RizePoint's Backup Window is 5x Shorter after Switch to ExaGrid-Veeam Solution

Customer Overview

RizePoint offers a proven SaaS solution for quality, compliance, and supplier management programs. With their time-tested quality management software, they empower users to create a hub of valuable compliance information that helps align organizational focus on keeping brand promises. The company is dedicated to helping customers gain visibility and spot trends as they build proactive quality management programs. RizePoint has been serving their customers for over 20 years from their headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Key Benefits:

  • ExaGrid-Veeam Accelerated Data Mover increases backup performance over RizePoint’s prior solution
  • Using ExaGrid saves time spent on backup management
  • RizePoint now restores data 6X faster than it used to
  • ExaGrid upgrades system remotely and quickly; outage windows no longer needed for maintenance
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Scalable ExaGrid System Offers Better Integration with Veeam

RizePoint had been backing up its data to a NetApp array and an Exablox device using Veeam. Jeremy Williams, RizePoint’s IT director, found that synthetic full backups took too long using this solution and looked for a product that would integrate better with Veeam.

“Our value-added reseller recommended ExaGrid, and we were very interested in the ExaGrid- Veeam Accelerated Data Mover as well as the dramatic speed increases that would be possible by switching to ExaGrid,” said Williams. “The ExaGrid sales team took the time to get to know our infrastructure, pain points, and what was happening with our existing solution. The team did a thorough evaluation of our data and backup windows in order to give us the best solution possible. It was very helpful.”

Scalability was also a major consideration in RizePoint’s decision to replace its solution. “Our company is growing very quickly; we’re adding many new customers, so our data needs have been expanding. ExaGrid’s ability to scale out by simply adding new hardware to the system was something that we weighed during the sales process. It was an important consideration in planning for our data growth,” said Williams.

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.

"It was easy to get our ExaGrid system set up and working with Veeam. It’s obvious that the two companies have worked together to create a great solution that works very well. "

Jeremy Williams, IT Director

Backup Windows are 5X Shorter and Restores are 6X Faster

Williams found that installing the new ExaGrid system was a simple process. “The ExaGrid appliance was delivered to our data center, and thanks to the straightforward instructions, our IT team installed and connected it to our network very quickly. Our ExaGrid support engineer explained everything clearly and helped us integrate the system with Veeam.”

The ExaGrid system is easy to install and use, and works seamlessly with all of the most frequently used backup applications, so an organization can seamlessly retain its investment in existing applications and processes. RizePoint’s data is backed up in daily incrementals and weekly synthetic fulls, and database transaction logs are backed up every 15 minutes. Most of its data consists of standard Microsoft servers and large databases. RizePoint’s environment is completely virtualized, making ExaGrid and Veeam an ideal solution to manage and store its backups.

Since switching to ExaGrid, Williams has found that he no longer worries about backup windows being too long. “It sometimes took up to 20 hours to create the synthetic full backup on our previous hardware. That’s been cut down to four hours with our ExaGrid system. The biggest difference we’ve noticed is its speed – both backups and restores are much faster. We were able to restore 100GB of data back to a server, and get it up and running again in less than ten minutes from ExaGrid. Restoring that amount of data would have taken over an hour with our previous solution! The major impact of switching to ExaGrid is that we don’t worry about our backup storage anymore. We know that backups will be fast and that the system is reliable.”

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 in the event that 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.

Well-Supported System Saves IT Staff Time

Williams appreciates how easy it is to manage the ExaGrid system, especially with the help of ExaGrid customer support. “Our ExaGrid support engineer has been great to work with. The service and support that we’re getting from the company is excellent, and that’s just as important to us as the hardware. Our support engineer is proactive and will send us an email to let us know when a new version of the software is out, detailing the new features and asking when he can upgrade our system. He takes care of everything and keeps us up-to-date. With most other vendors, you have to schedule an outage window to perform that maintenance, but our ExaGrid support engineer is able to upgrade us remotely and quickly, usually in just half an hour.

“We get automated emails each day that give us status updates on our backup jobs and system health, so it has been very easy to manage. When we were using NetApp, we had to manually perform maintenance on it just to keep our backups running normally. Switching to ExaGrid has saved us time on managing our backup environment, and it’s been running great,” said Williams.

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

Williams has been impressed with ExaGrid’s integration with Veeam. “It was easy to get our ExaGrid system set up and working with Veeam. It’s obvious that the two companies have worked together to create a great solution that works very well.”

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.

ExaGrid-Veeam Combined Dedupe

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.

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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