Saker ShopRite's Inc.

Saker ShopRite's Inc. Bags Incomplete Backups and the Hassles of Tape by Implementing ExaGrid's Disk-based Backup and Deduplication Solution

Customer Overview

Saker ShopRite’s, Inc. owns and operates 39 ShopRite supermarkets, 30 pharmacies, two liquor stores, and Dearborn Market and Garden Center in New Jersey. In addition to these retail locations, the Saker Family also owns and operates four commissary kitchens and a transit dock facility which supports their local stores. The fourth and fifth generation family-owned company employs over 9,000 associates and is the largest member-owner of Wakefern Food Corp., which is the largest retailer-owned supermarket cooperative in the United States. Saker ShopRite’s maintains a century long family tradition of giving back to the communities in which they work and live. Over 1,300 Central Jersey organizations have benefited from the company’s charitable donations, which includes the Joan Dancy & Pals ALS foundation. Additionally, Saker ShopRite’s supports ShopRite Partners in Caring, ShopRite’s year-round hunger-fighting initiative. Since its inception in 1999, ShopRite Partners in Caring has donated $48 million to food banks that support more than 2,000 charities.

Key Benefits:

Seamless integration with Veritas Backup Exec
System can be easily expanded by simply adding capacity
Backup window reduced from 15 to 4 hours
Adaptive deduplication makes restores fast with no stress

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Long Backups and Unreliable Tape Library

Long backups and unreliable tape library issues had been plaguing the IT staff at Saker ShopRite for some time. Backing up its expanding merchandising data each night to tape became more and more difficult.

“Backing up to tape just wasn’t working,” said Jim Connolly, Vice President of Information Technology at Saker ShopRite’s. “Using tape was not reliable. We were constantly experiencing issues with tape failures as well as going outside of our backup windows. Also, restoring data from tape was time consuming. We needed a solution that would make our backups faster and more reliable.”

Saker ShopRite’s began looking for a new solution to alleviate its long backup windows, difficult restore processes and retention issues and chose ExaGrid’s disk-based backup system with data deduplication. The ExaGrid system works alongside Saker ShopRite’s existing backup application, Veritas Backup Exec. “We looked at a few different solutions but ExaGrid’s feature set was unmatched and was extremely cost-effective,” said Connolly. “We liked the fact that the ExaGrid system worked with Backup Exec. It enabled us to leverage our existing investment in Backup Exec and we didn’t have to learn new software or change our backup processes. It’s been our experience that the two products work together seamlessly.”

"With the ExaGrid system, we are now able to complete our backups well within our windows each and every day. We’re no longer stressed about getting our backups completed before the start of the workday and we’re meeting our goals with ease. "

James Connolly, Vice President, Information Technology

Full Backups Reduced by Two-Thirds after Implementing ExaGrid

Saker ShopRite’s data is backed up to the ExaGrid appliance and then sent to tape each night. Prior to installing the ExaGrid system, daily full backups took more than 15 hours, but have been reduced to only four hours with the ExaGrid system.

“With the ExaGrid system, we are now able to complete our backups well within our windows each and every day,” said Connolly. “We’re no longer stressed about getting our backups completed before the start of the workday and we’re meeting our goals with ease. ExaGrid’s data deduplication technology really helps make our backups and restores faster.”

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).

Easy Installation, Superior Customer Support

The IT staff at Saker ShopRite’s installed the ExaGrid system themselves and found the process easy. “Installation was simple and straightforward. We followed the documentation and then ExaGrid’s customer support engineer dialed into the system to give us an overview of the system features. It couldn’t have been easier,” said Connolly. “We’ve had a wonderful experience with ExaGrid’s customer support team. They are extremely responsive and can usually resolve any issue or question we have within minutes.”

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.

Easy Expandability

“We like the fact that the ExaGrid system can be easily expanded by simply adding capacity to our current system,” said Connolly. “The ExaGrid’s modular design will enable us to expand it to accommodate more data at any point in the future.”

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.

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.

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.

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