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.”