Ready to Talk to a System Engineer?

Please enter your information and we'll contact you to set up a call. Thank you!

Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid Dedupe Provides SpawGlass with Significant Storage Savings without Sacrificing Performance

Customer Overview

Texas-based commercial and civil construction services provider, SpawGlass was founded in 1953 by Louis Spaw and Frank Glass, hence the name SpawGlass. With 10 offices across Texas, the company has approximately 750 employees and is 100 percent employee-owned – with ownership open to all employees. The company’s mission is to provide clients with the absolute best construction experience.

Key Benefits:

  • ExaGrid dedupe allows SpawGlass to store more backup jobs on same amount of disk
  • Backup windows shorter after switch to ExaGrid
  • IT staff can quickly restore data from ExaGrid’s Landing Zone
  • ExaGrid support provides ‘white-glove’ level of service
Download PDF

ExaGrid Wins Backup Bake-Off

SpawGlass had been backing up its data to local disk and a storage array, using Veeam. As the company’s infrastructure was nearing its end of life, the IT staff decided it was the right time to refresh its backup environment with a new storage solution. “I attended a presentation about ExaGrid at the Texas Technology Summit and was impressed with how the technology worked and that ExaGrid is solely focused on making a very good backup solution,” said Keefe Andrews, IT Infrastructure Manager at SpawGlass.

“It was important to us that our new solution worked well with Veeam. We got pricing for several solutions, including Dell EMC Data Domain, ExaGrid, and StorageCraft, and then decided to have a bake-off between ExaGrid and StorageCraft. We were able to test how backups and restores worked on both platforms, and how well both integrated with Veeam. We really appreciated that the companies were willing to invest an appliance and test it in our environment without having to commit to a purchase. This allowed us to really evaluate the product and validate the claims that we made,” said Andrews. “What led us to choose ExaGrid was its partnership with Veeam, and the high level of backup performance the ExaGrid system provided compared with other solutions we researched.”

Andrews was impressed that ExaGrid takes the time to get to know a potential customer’s backup environment to ensure proper sizing of the ExaGrid system. “The ExaGrid sales engineer made sure to run calculations on our backup footprint, which is very forward-thinking, so we wouldn’t be stuck in a situation where we would buy a product and then fully saturate it six to twelve months later.”

The ExaGrid system is easy to install and use and works seamlessly with the industry’s leading backup applications so that an organization can retain its investment in its existing backup applications and processes.

"ExaGrid’s Landing Zone technology is a great feature because it allows you to leverage dedupe, but not take the performance hit when you have to do a restore. "

Keefe Andrews, IT Infrastructure Manager

Landing Zone ‘Leverages Dedupe Without Performance Hit’

As a general contractor, SpawGlass has a large amount of construction-related data and documents to back up, and most of it is unstructured data, such as PDFs, drawings, Word, and Excel files. Andrews backs up the data on a daily basis. “We’ve changed our backup strategy to leverage snapshots and our backups. Thankfully, reduced backups during production hours. We’ve been able to switch our backup schedule to do fewer periodic and hourly backups, and we’ve noticed that our backup windows are shorter since switching to ExaGrid,” said Andrews.

Andrews appreciates ExaGrid’s unique Adaptive Deduplication and Landing Zone technology. “ExaGrid’s Landing Zone technology is a great feature because it allows you to leverage dedupe, but not take the performance hit when you have to do a restore. Whenever we’ve had to restore any data, our ExaGrid system has always been able to meet our expectations,” he said.

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).

Deduplication Provides Storage Savings

Andrews has noticed that data deduplication has had an impact on storage capacity. “Storage savings is a major advantage of using the ExaGrid system. We’ve noticed that we’re able to do more backups on the same amount of raw disk storage, compared to when we backed up to local disk. It’s also been a big timesaver, because we’re able to send all of the backup jobs to the ExaGrid system and no longer have to worry about moving jobs around or adjusting our retention policy because drives are getting full. There’s a lot less backup administration since we started using ExaGrid.”

Andrews also finds that it’s easy to keep track of backup performance through daily reporting from the ExaGrid system. “We can monitor how our storage usage is being consumed on the appliance so I’ve got an idea of how well everything is working and make sure that we’re getting that return on investment. We’re getting the dedupe ratios that were advertised to us when we purchased,” he said.

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.

‘White Glove’ Support from ExaGrid

One of the features that Andrews appreciates the most is working with an assigned ExaGrid support engineer. “Working with a single support engineer has made getting our questions answered and keeping up with system maintenance effortless. We have a quarterly cadence call, just to check on the system performance. Whenever there is a firmware or disk drive update for the system, my support engineer facilitates it for us. It’s given me peace of mind working with our ExaGrid support engineer who knows our environment, and that I’m also working on a platform that’s currently being updated. It’s not like any other platform where it’s up to us to figure it out. We feel like it’s a white-glove service that ExaGrid offers to us to help us maintain and get the most out our system,” said Andrews.

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.

Talk to us about your needs

ExaGrid is the expert in backup storage—it’s all we do.

Request Pricing

Our team is trained to ensure that your system is properly sized and supported to meet your growing data needs.

Contact us for pricing »

Talk With One of Our System Engineers

With ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage, each appliance in the system brings with it not only disk, but also memory, bandwidth, and processing power—all the elements needed to maintain high backup performance.

Schedule call »

Schedule Proof of Concept (POC)

Test ExaGrid by installing it in your environment to experience improved backup performance, faster restores, ease of use, and scalability. Put it to the test! 8 out of 10 who test it, decide to keep it.

Schedule now »