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.”