Ready to Talk to a System Engineer?

Please enter your information and we'll contact you to set up a call. Thank you!

Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

The Remedy for Backup and DR Woes at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada

Customer Overview

Based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada is the national professional association that oversees the medical education of specialists in Canada. Consisting of over 42,000 specialists, The Royal College is dedicated to promoting sound health policies through national certification examinations and lifelong learning programs. The organization’s IT department is made up of 33 members that handle various areas of IT operations including network administration, help desk support, application development, Oracle administration and support, end-user training and various administrative support staff.

Key Benefits:

  • Seamless integration with current backup apps, Veritas Backup Exec and Arcserve
  • Fast restores
  • Significant cost savings
  • Time savings allow focus on other IT projects
  • Phenomenal and responsive customer support
Download PDF

Cost-effective ExaGrid Improves Backup and DR Capabilities

The Royal College’s IT department began searching for a disk-based solution after the organization felt that it had run its course with its previous tape solution. According to Senior Network and Security Administrator Christian Monette, backing up company data from file servers, Oracle databases and Exchange, was very cumbersome and more importantly, very unreliable. The process of backing up to tape was very sequential as the backups went from one server to the next. With the ExaGrid, according to Monette, the organization could run all jobs simultaneously – making the process much more efficient.

“We’d start our monthly backups at 7 a.m. on Saturday and they would only get finished at noon on Monday – sometimes even longer than that,” said Monette. “We felt that we needed something that could help us reduce the amount of our stored data and replication to also improve our disaster recovery capabilities.”

After evaluating different tape solutions and alternative disk-based solutions, the Royal College selected a two-site ExaGrid system. The ExaGrid system works alongside the organization’s two existing backup applications, Veritas Backup Exec and Arcserve. The primary ExaGrid system is situated in the main data center in Ottawa and data is automatically replicated to the organization’s disaster recovery location. “We looked closely at different options but when it came down to overall performance capabilities and ease of use, ExaGrid was the clear leader,” said Monette.

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 data deduplication technology also helps speed the transmission of data between the Royal College’s two ExaGrid systems because only changes are moved between sites, minimizing the amount of bandwidth needed.

"When we were evaluating solutions, we wanted something that would scale as our organization and data requirements grew. ExaGrid gives us that ability to scale in the future while continuing to leverage our current investment. "

Christian Monette, Senior Network and Security Administrator

Fast Restores, Scalability for Growing Data Requirements

The Royal College’s IT staff have also noticed a significant improvement in the amount of time and resources spent on restoring files. “The ability to restore data quickly and easily is really where the ExaGrid shines,” said Monette. The IT staff often gets requests to restore files that are weeks or months old, and restoring that data from tape used to take hours or days – or not at all, according to Monette. Historically, his staff would get the requests for a restore but quick turnarounds were few and far between.

Occasionally, the IT staff would get so busy that they would miss changing tapes and backups just wouldn’t get done. Other times, there were issues with damaged tapes or missing data from tapes. According to Monette, because the ExaGrid system never moves and is there when they need it, his team can store months of data on the system and have that history available at their fingertips.

“Restoring data from tape was a huge hassle but with the ExaGrid, our data is now always available at our fingertips for restores,” said Monette. “We’re saving a lot of money on tape and cutting down time that used to be spent on managing tape libraries to now focus on other IT projects.”

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.

“When we were evaluating solutions, we wanted something that would scale as our organization and data requirements grew,” said Monette.  “ExaGrid gives us that ability to scale in the future while continuing to leverage our current investment.”

Expert and Responsive Customer Support

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.

“The ExaGrid support staff is simply phenomenal,” said Monette. “We haven’t had many technical issues with the ExaGrid but the few times we have, the staff was always very responsive and knowledgeable, working relentlessly until a solution was achieved.”

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.

ExaGrid and Arcserve Backup

Efficient backup requires close integration between the backup software and backup storage. That is the advantage delivered by the partnership between Arcserve and ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage. Together, Arcserve and ExaGrid provide a cost-effective backup solution that scales to meet the needs of demanding enterprise environments.

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.

Talk to us about your needs

ExaGrid is the expert in backup storage—it’s all we do.

Request Pricing

Our team is trained to ensure that your system is properly sized and supported to meet your growing data needs.

Contact us for pricing »

Talk With One of Our System Engineers

With ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage, each appliance in the system brings with it not only disk, but also memory, bandwidth, and processing power—all the elements needed to maintain high backup performance.

Schedule call »

Schedule Proof of Concept (POC)

Test ExaGrid by installing it in your environment to experience improved backup performance, faster restores, ease of use, and scalability. Put it to the test! 8 out of 10 who test it, decide to keep it.

Schedule now »