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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

St. John’s Riverside Healthcare Chooses ExaGrid over Competition for Price, Performance and Ease of Use

Customer Overview

St. John’s Riverside Hospital is a comprehensive network of health care services that extends from Yonkers, New York to the riverfront communities of Hastings on Hudson, Dobbs Ferry, Ardsley and Irvington. With roots in the community since 1869, St. John’s was the first hospital in Westchester County and today is a leader in providing quality, compassionate healthcare utilizing the latest state-of-the-art medical technology.

Key Benefits:

  • Significantly less expensive & easy to manage
  • Dedupe rates as high as 29:1
  • Backup window cut in half
  • Restores take seconds
  • Seamless integration with Veritas NetBackup
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Outdated Solution Causes Serious Problems

St. John’s Riverside Hospital had been backing up the majority of its data to a combination of disk and tape, but lack of capacity led to long backup times, system slowdowns, and retention issues.

“We had simply outgrown the capacity of our old backup infrastructure and were suffering the consequences,” said Niall Pariag, senior network administrator at St. John’s Riverside Hospital. “Since we run 24/7 shifts here, we need to ensure that our backup times are as short as possible so that we don’t impact our users. When our backup times began to stretch beyond 12 hours, our server response time slowed down significantly and it simply wasn’t acceptable,” he said. According to Pariag, “Capacity was also a big issue with the disk system. Obviously, the lack of capacity affected our retention as well. We finally decided the time was right to implement a state of the art solution capable of meeting our current and future needs.”

"The ExaGrid was significantly less expensive than the other system we were considering, and we felt that ExaGrid’s post-process data deduplication technology would provide faster backups versus the competitor’s inline data deduplication approach. We didn’t want a situation where the backup software was waiting on the appliance. We’ve been very happy with both ExaGrid’s data deduplication and its backup speed. "

Niall Pariag, Senior Network Administrator

Two-Site ExaGrid System Improves Disaster Recovery, Delivers Fast Backups

After looking at various backup solutions on the market, St. John’s Riverside Hospital narrowed the field down to disk-based backup systems from ExaGrid and a leading competitor. After considering both products, the hospital eventually chose a two-site ExaGrid system along with Veritas NetBackup to back up its SQL and Oracle databases as well as other file and business data. Data is replicated each night from the main EX10000E system located in the hospital’s main datacenter to an EX5000 located offsite for disaster recovery.

“The two main reasons we chose the ExaGrid system were its approach to data deduplication and price,” said Pariag. “The ExaGrid was significantly less expensive than the other system we were considering, and we felt that ExaGrid’s post-process data deduplication technology would provide faster backups versus the competitor’s inline data deduplication approach. We didn’t want a situation where the backup software was waiting on the appliance. We’ve been very happy with both ExaGrid’s data deduplication and its backup speed.”

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).

“As we researched options, we began to wonder if the salespeople were inflating the product’s performance claims, and we weren’t sure if the ExaGrid solution could meet their stated performance,” said Pariag. “The ExaGrid has been delivering dedupe ratios as high as 29:1 for our SQL data. In our environment, the ExaGrid system has met or exceeded the claims made during the sales process.”

Since installing the ExaGrid system, the hospital’s backup times have been significantly reduced, and retention has improved. Backup times have been cut in half to six hours, and the hospital’s retention has been increased from one week to three months. “Our backups are now extremely fast, and we don’t have to worry about pushing up against our backup window,” said Pariag. “In addition, we’re able to retain three months of data on ExaGrid. Restores are also so much faster than they were before. We can restore information directly off the ExaGrid, and it takes seconds.”

Easy to Install and Maintain, Expert Support

Pariag said he worked with the ExaGrid customer support engineer assigned to the hospital to set the system up and was surprised at how simple and straightforward the process was and how easy it is to manage the system.

“There isn’t a lot to manage on the ExaGrid system because the system basically runs by itself. The interface is easy to use, and all the monitoring information is on one screen. It’s a lot easier and less complicated than other systems to manage,” he said. “Our ExaGrid support engineer has been extremely helpful to us. We switched to NetBackup when we installed the ExaGrid, so everything was new to us. Our ExaGrid support engineer is very knowledgeable about NetBackup, and he actually helped set it up for us. He made it really easy.”

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.

System Scalability Prevents Forklift Upgrades

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 purchased the ExaGrid system, we found it to be so cost-effective that we were able to get a larger system than we ordinarily would have for a reasonable price. However, it’s nice to know that we will be able to add another unit to the system at a later date if our data grows significantly. We won’t have to perform a forklift upgrade because the system was designed to be scalable,” said Pariag. “We’ve been very pleased with the ExaGrid system.”

ExaGrid and Veritas NetBackup

Veritas NetBackup delivers high-performance data protection that scales to protect the largest enterprise environments. ExaGrid is integrated with and certified by Veritas in 9 areas, including Accelerator, AIR, single disk pool, analytics, and other areas to ensure full support of NetBackup. ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage offers the fastest backups, the fastest restores, and the only true scale-out solution as data grows to provide a fixed-length backup window and a non-network-facing tier (tiered air gap) for recovery from a ransomware event.

Intelligent Data Protection

ExaGrid’s turnkey disk-based backup system combines enterprise drives with zone-level data deduplication, delivering a disk-based solution that is far more cost effective than simply backing up to disk with deduplication or using backup software deduplication to disk. ExaGrid’s patented zone-level deduplication reduces the disk space needed by a range of 10:1 to 50:1, depending on the data types and retention periods, by storing only the unique objects across backups instead of redundant data. Adaptive Deduplication performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups. As data is being deduplicated to the repository, it is also replicated to a second ExaGrid site or the public cloud for disaster recovery (DR).

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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