Meeting Regulatory Compliance Difficult with Tape

The IT department at Sommer must tailor its backup policies and disaster recovery capabilities to meet stringent industry standards, but the manufacturer had difficulty meeting its backup, retention and restore goals with tape. Restoring data from tape was time consuming and the company had difficulty meeting its mandated three month retention period. “We were having a hard time meeting industry regulation using tape,” said Michael Müller, systems administrator at Sommer. “It was difficult to manage and administer so many tapes and restoring data was a long process. We needed a solution that would provide us with fast restores and increased retention.”

Sommer’s IT department decided to begin looking for an alternative solution that would provide faster backups and restores and enough capacity to cost-effectively store three months of backups on-site. The company initially tried to back up the firm’s data to disk but found that disk space quickly became an issue without data compression. The experiment proved to Sommer’s IT department that disk-based backup was the right direction and Müller began researching various solutions. After experimenting with several different solutions, Sommer chose an ExaGrid disk- based backup system.

The ExaGrid system works along with the company’s existing backup application, Dell Networker. “The ExaGrid system was extremely cost effective and gave us the backup and restore performance and the retention we needed,” said Müller. “ExaGrid’s data deduplication technology is very effective at reducing our data and it enables us to make the most of our disk space. The data deduplication is automatic and happens in the background, so we never even know it is occurring.”

ExaGrid and Dell NetWorker

Dell NetWorker provides a complete, flexible and integrated backup and recovery solution for Windows, NetWare, Linux and UNIX environments. For large datacenters or individual departments, Dell EMC NetWorker protects and helps ensure the availability of all critical applications and data. It features the highest levels of hardware support for even the largest devices, innovative support for disk technologies, storage area network (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS) environments and reliable protection of enterprise class databases and messaging systems.

Organizations using NetWorker can look to ExaGrid for nightly backups. ExaGrid sits behind existing backup applications, such as NetWorker, providing faster and more reliable backups and restores. In a network running NetWorker, using ExaGrid 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 the ExaGrid for onsite backup to disk.