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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

SeaBright Ensures Better Backups with ExaGrid

Customer Overview

SeaBright Insurance Company is a specialty provider of niche workers’ compensation insurance for upper middle-market employers with severity exposures. Based in Seattle, Washington, The Seattle-based specialty insurer was acquired by Enstar Group of Bermuda.

Key Benefits:

  • Seamless integration with Veritas Backup Exec
  • High compression enables them to keep a considerable amount of data on our ExaGrid system
  • Cost-effective solution
  • Pro-active support is a huge advantage
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Existing System Leads to Compliance Issues

For years, SeaBright Insurance had been backing up its data electronically using an online backup system. The solution backed up data locally to a disk array and then sent a copy of the backup to a designated offsite location for storage, where the data was kept for a year. The legacy system didn’t support tape so it was nearly impossible for the company to meet retention periods mandated by Sarbanes-Oxley.

As part of its business continuity plan, the IT department also had an internal mandate to ensure that it could bring its production environment up within 36 hours in the event of a disaster, something that was also difficult with its current solution.

“Some of our data needs to be retained for many years,” said Jeff Wilkinson, senior network engineer for SeaBright Insurance. “The obvious answer was to back that information up to tape, but we didn’t have that capability with our legacy solution.” SeaBright began to reevaluate its backup strategy and decided to bring its backup capabilities back in-house. The IT department liked the speed and simplicity of backing up to disk but needed a system that would provide the ability to back up to tape for long term storage.

"With the ExaGrid, we can add storage on the fly and the system will automatically load balance the data across multiple disks. And because we can add capacity in small increments, it’s cost-effective because we only need to purchase enough disk to meet our needs. "

Jeff Wilkinson, Sr. Network Engineer

Two-site ExaGrid System Provides Replication, Support for Tape Copy

After considering several competitive solutions, SeaBright chose a two-site ExaGrid system in combination with Veritas Backup Exec. SeaBright backs up all of its data to the ExaGrid system, including its file server data, Exchange, SQL databases, and VMware systems. SeaBright placed one ExaGrid appliance at its datacenter in Scottsdale, Arizona and a second site ExaGrid system offsite in Austin, Texas. The two sites are connected via a dedicated DS3 line.

“We chose the ExaGrid system because it is easily scalable, provided offsite replication capability and it gave us the data deduplication we needed,” said Wilkinson. “The ExaGrid was more cost-effective than the other solutions we looked at and it provided all of the features we were looking for and more.”

The IT staff at SeaBright now performs full backups each weekend and incremental backups each night onto the ExaGrid system in Scottsdale. The data is then automatically replicated to its Austin site for disaster recovery purposes. Additionally, certain types of data are backed up to disk quarterly for long term storage. The company is more easily able to maintain full compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and also meet all of its business continuity goals.

Data Deduplication Reduces Data, Speeds Data Transmission Between Sites

“ExaGrid’s data deduplication technology has been very effective at reducing our data, and it has made the replication between sites fast and efficient,” said Wilkinson. “Our compression numbers have been high and we’re able to keep a considerable amount of data on our ExaGrid system.”

ExaGrid combines last backup compression along with data deduplication, which stores changes from backup to backup instead of storing full file copies. 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 Scalability, Proactive Customer Support

One of the big challenges that SeaBright had with its legacy system was scalability. In addition to writing a copy of the backup data to the company’s designated offsite location, the system also wrote a copy of the backup to a local disk array. However, when SeaBright outgrew the system, the upgrade process took 36 hours and the firm couldn’t perform backups during that time.

“With the ExaGrid, we can add storage on the fly and the system will automatically load balance the data across multiple disks,” said Wilkinson. “And because we can add capacity in small increments, it’s cost-effective because we only need to purchase enough disk to meet our needs.”

ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture provides easy scalability, so the system can grow as SeaBright’s backup requirements grow. When plugged into a switch, additional ExaGrid appliances virtualize into one another, appearing as a single system to the backup server, and load balancing of all data across servers is automatic.

ExaGrid’s in-house customer support was also an important factor in choosing the ExaGrid system. “The system was easy to install and configure and ExaGrid’s customer support team has been very proactive. ExaGrid provides a very high level of support for the product and to us, that’s a huge advantage,” said Wilkinson.

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.

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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