Shorter Backup Times, Data Deduplication Help to Maximize Retention
The Salvation Army purchased a two-site ExaGrid system and installed one appliance in its datacenter in West Nyack and a second in Syracuse. Data is automatically replicated between the two systems each night. Levine said that in addition to eliminating tape, the agency’s backup windows have also been significantly reduced, giving the IT staff plenty of time for maintenance and upgrades.
“Our backups kick off each night at 7:30 p.m. and most of them are finished by 12:30 a.m. With tape, our nightly backups were running all night and finishing up at 8:30 a.m., just in time to start the workday,” he said. “We now have plenty of breathing room to work on the system if we need to.”
Levine said that ExaGrid’s strong data deduplication technology helps to reduce the amount of data stored
and increases retention. “The ExaGrid system does a fantastic job at reducing our data. We’re currently able to keep our weekly backups for four weeks and monthly backups for six months.”
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).