Scalability Important to Long-Term Planning
Sky Deutschland initially purchased the ExaGrid system it tested during the POC at its data center in Germany, and also scaled it out with additional appliances to accommodate the large amount of the data that the company needs to backup. Additional ExaGrid systems were later added at secondary datacenters in Italy and Germany, replicating data between the sites for geo-resilient data protection. Smajlovic appreciates that ExaGrid is flexible, allowing appliances to be easily moved and added to any site, no matter the location.
“Some backup storage vendors will not allow for hardware to be moved across countries. ExaGrid allows for any piece of hardware to be moved, so if we close a location and open an office somewhere else, we can move our ExaGrid systems as well. This was an important consideration for our long-term planning,” he said. One the aspects Smajlovic appreciates about the combined solution of ExaGrid and Veeam is that the scale-out architecture of both ensures that backup and restore performance will not be affected by anticipated data growth, and that there will be no storage capacity issues with long-term retention.
“When we need space, we can add more appliances to the system. Both solutions really scale out – we can add more as we need to. We don’t feel locked into something because there are so many configuration possibilities. It’s very a modular solution, so we can make adjustments and figure out how it fits best for us. For example, if we need more speed, then we will add more proxy servers from Veeam. That level of adjustment is completely flexible,” he said.
The ExaGrid system can easily scale to accommodate data growth. ExaGrid’s software makes the system highly scalable – appliances of any size or age can be mixed and matched in a single system. A single scale-out system can take in up to a 2.7PB full backup plus retention at an ingest rate of up to 488TB per hour.