‘Smart System’ Provides ‘Remarkable’ Throughput
Norr backs up a large variety of data at South Shore Neurologic Associates. “SQL is a big part of everything that we do. We have several mission critical databases used by different departments in the organization. We have an MRI facility that uses a Radiology Information System (RIS) comprised of multiple components that are SQL-driven, storing dictation using Dragon Medical files, as well as patient information and scheduling, and including a Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) server where all the DICOM images are stored, and those take up a huge amount of data. That’s all integrated into a suite application that is connected to the dissimilar systems with HL7 interfaces. In addition, we have an Electronic Health Records (EHR) system comprised of multiple hosts, which consists of a large amount of data to back up.”
Norr has found that since switching to an ExaGrid-Veeam solution, backup windows are significantly shorter. “It used to take up to 14 hours for a full backup to land onto the NAS appliance, despite the fact that it had multiple inputs, multiple routes that the data could come in from. It was so slow, and sometimes if the other procedures were occurring at the same time, either the procedure or the backup would fail. We don’t have to worry about those issues anymore because that same full backup takes three-and-a- half hours with our ExaGrid system. It’s just remarkable! If we were still using our older system, we would not experience the throughput that we’re experiencing now. We needed our backups to be faster without changing our infrastructure, and ExaGrid has been a key component in making this happen.
“I like how flexible the ExaGrid system is with scheduling backup jobs and replication. We’re able to block out time during the backup where we can change the throttling and bandwidth that is used so that it doesn’t affect productivity. One of my favorite features of the ExaGrid system is how it handles deduplication. Veeam backs up the data and it goes right to the ExaGrid system, and once the backup is finished, it doesn’t sit there like a dumb NAS box, but starts deduplication at that point so it doesn’t slow down the whole process. The ExaGrid system is smart, and it can sense how busy the system is so that it starts deduplication and replication to a satellite office at an optimized time, without interrupting our other operations,” he said. Norr has also been impressed with how easily data is restored from the ExaGrid system. “ExaGrid has taken the guesswork out of restoring data. The system is smart and knows where to pull files from. We simply open Veeam and select the backup job to restore from and ExaGrid takes it from there. It’s great that we don’t need to be very granular.”
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).