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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Rogers Towers Optimizes Environment with ExaGrid

Customer Overview

Since 1905, the attorneys and staff of Rogers Towers, P.A. have been dedicated to its clients. One of Florida’s largest law firms, its clientele includes Fortune 500 companies, banking and financial institutions, small and growing businesses, local governments, developers, not-for-profit organizations, investor- and municipally owned companies, and individuals

Key Benefits:

  • Rogers Towers finds solution with ‘phenomenal’ deduplication
  • ExaGrid’s committed support staff spent four months working with Rogers Towers staff to reorganize environment
  • Restores are ‘quite simple’ using ExaGrid and Veeam
  • ExaGrid system works with both Veeam and Veritas Backup Exec
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ExaGrid Support Guides Reorganization of Environment

Rogers Towers had a storage environment that had not been fully optimized. When Dennis J. Slater became the law firm’s information technology manager, he decided to reorganize the existing VM servers and reevaluate which data from those servers to back up. Slater noted, “We had 80 VM servers, and we have been able to narrow that down to 55. Some of our servers were not backed up at all while there were some that were not backing up correctly. There was a large cleanup process for our backups as well as our systems overall.

“Our ExaGrid support engineer was a great help through that process. He helped me to understand best practices for backing up the systems and the best way to implement them. We set up a plan for each of the backups on the VMs and on the physical servers. We worked together for about four months on this project, getting the original systems to a point where they were functioning as optimally as possible.”

The ExaGrid system was designed to be easy to set up and maintain, and ExaGrid’s industry- leading customer support team is staffed by trained, in-house engineers who are assigned to individual accounts. ExaGrid works seamlessly with all of the most frequently used backup applications, so an organization can seamlessly retain its investment in existing applications and processes. Rogers Towers uses Veeam to manage the backups of its numerous VM servers and uses Veritas Backup Exec for its physical servers. “We have a unique situation. As a law firm, our staff requires very large email boxes. Prior to building the Microsoft Exchange environment with the hardware that we use, the data store size would often crash the system,” said Slater. The Exchange environment is one of a few still on a physical server, but Slater hopes to move to a completely virtual environment in the near future.

"Because our deduplication rate is excellent, we’re able to back up double the amount of data that we have on our servers to the ExaGrid system. ExaGrid’s deduplication is phenomenal. "

Dennis J. Slater, Information Technology Manager

Upgrade Leads to More Storage and Opportunity for Disaster Recovery

The ExaGrid system is easy to install and use and works seamlessly with the industry’s leading backup applications so that an organization can retain its investment in its existing backup applications and processes. In addition, ExaGrid appliances can replicate to a second ExaGrid appliance at a second site or to the public cloud for DR (disaster recovery). While upgrading Rogers Towers’ storage environment, Slater decided to purchase an EX32000E appliance to increase throughput and gain a cushion of extra storage, and moved the company’s existing EX13000E appliance to a DR site. “Installation of the new appliance went well. We just had to plug it in and our support engineer took care of the rest,” he said.

ExaGrid-Veeam Combo Offers ‘Phenomenal’ Deduplication and Easy Restores

Rogers Towers backs up its data in daily incrementals and weekly fulls. Most of its data is
document-based and also includes databases stored on SQL servers. Slater has been impressed with the performance of ExaGrid and Veeam in backing up its virtual servers. He said, “Because our deduplication rate is excellent, we’re able to back up double the amount of data that we have on our servers to the ExaGrid system. ExaGrid’s deduplication is phenomenal.”

The law firm backs up its VMs regularly to allow for quick restores, when needed. Slater noted that the restore process only takes a few minutes. “Restores are quite simple using both ExaGrid and Veeam. They work great together, so all that is needed is to search for the VM that a file is on, click ‘Restore,’ and it goes,” said Slater.

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.

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.

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.

ExaGrid and Veritas Backup Exec

Veritas Backup Exec provides cost-effective, high-performance backup and recovery – including continuous data protection for Microsoft Exchange servers, Microsoft SQL servers, file servers, and workstations. High-performance agents and options provide fast, flexible, granular protection and scalable management of local and remote server backups.

Organizations using Veritas Backup Exec can look to ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage for nightly backups. ExaGrid sits behind existing backup applications, such as Veritas Backup Exec, providing faster and more reliable backups and restores. In a network running Veritas Backup Exec, using ExaGrid is as easy as pointing existing backup jobs at a NAS share on the ExaGrid system. Backup jobs are sent directly from the backup application to ExaGrid for backup to disk.

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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