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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

'Absolutely Amazing' ExaGrid-Veeam Solution Quadruples Security Central's Data Retention

Customer Overview

Security Central is based in North Carolina, and serves customers nationwide with Boutique Monitoring Services that are professional, responsive and innovative. For more than 55 years, their family-owned business has focused on meeting the needs of alarm dealers and their customers.

Key Benefits:

  • Security Central increases backup retention from some data for two weeks to all data for eight weeks
  • ExaGrid-Veeam Accelerated Data Mover significantly increases speed of backups
  • ‘Fantastic’ ExaGrid customer support provides expertise on entire backup environment
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ExaGrid-Veeam Solution Replaces Aging Unitrends System

Security Central had been backing up its data to a Unitrends appliance for several years, and once it reached capacity and could no longer accommodate backing up all the company’s servers, the IT staff knew they had outgrown that solution. The Security Central team considered upgrading to a newer Unitrends system, but Unitrends had been charging extra fees for supporting the aging appliance, and the IT staff felt that the value of the solution did not substantiate Unitrends’ pricing.

Art Piwcio, director of infrastructure and development, reached out to Security Central’s IT reseller, who recommended replacing their Unitrends system with an ExaGrid-Veeam solution. “We wanted to replace our infrastructure and consolidate down to a hyper-converged solution. Our reseller recommended Veeam and told us that ExaGrid was the best backup storage system to run behind it – that they are absolutely wonderful together. His recommendation was good enough for me, so we installed both products in our data center.

“The ExaGrid system we purchased had much more storage capacity than the Unitrends system we’d been using, so we weren’t worried about exceeding capacity, especially since our reseller emphasized ExaGrid’s scalability. He told us that if we ran low on space, or if our UL regulations changed, all we’d need to do is plug in another ExaGrid appliance, and that would increase our storage as well as maintaining the speed of our backups and restores. We were so shocked, we almost wanted to buy another one just to try it out! It’s not that simple with other backup storage solutions,” said Piwcio.

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.

"When we checked the reports from our ExaGrid system, we were astonished that the backup took up hardly any space at all, so we started backing up our entire infrastructure, and thanks to data deduplication, we’re using just 40% of capacity. It’s absolutely amazing! "

Art Piwcio, Director of Infrastructure and Development

‘Amazing’ Deduplication Quadruples Data Retention

Piwcio backs up Security Central’s data in daily incrementals and weekly fulls. “The first time that we backed up our data to ExaGrid using Veeam, we couldn’t get over the speed of the backups and how well they worked. Veeam’s Data Mover feature that ExaGrid integrated into its product is incredible – it certainly moves the data, that’s for sure!”

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).

“When we checked the reports from our ExaGrid system, we were astonished that the backup took up hardly any space at all, so we started backing up our entire infrastructure, and thanks to data deduplication, we’re using just 40% of capacity. It’s absolutely amazing! We’d been limited to keeping two weeks of our smaller backups with Unitrends, and now we easily keep eight weeks of all of our data, and have plenty of space to keep more, if we want to,” said Piwcio.

ExaGrid-Veeam Combined Dedupe

Veeam uses changed block tracking to perform a level of data deduplication. ExaGrid allows Veeam deduplication and Veeam dedupe-friendly compression to stay on. ExaGrid will increase Veeam’s deduplication by a factor of about 7:1 to a total combined deduplication ratio of 14:1, reducing the storage required and saving on storage costs up front and over time.

‘Fantastic’ Customer Support

Piwcio values the expert advice that he and the IT staff receive from their assigned ExaGrid support engineer. “We were having some issues after a firmware upgrade, and our support engineer helped us work through a quirk that needed correcting; everything’s been rock-solid since. When you call customer support at other companies, sometimes it takes weeks to get a response, but ExaGrid support is responsive and helpful, even when it comes to questions on other aspects of our backup environment, such as Veeam. The support is just fantastic; I wish every company offered support like that.”

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 Veeam

Veeam’s backup solutions and ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage combine for the industry’s fastest backups, fastest restores, a scale-out storage system as data grows, and a strong ransomware recovery story – all at the lowest cost.

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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