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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid Earns High Marks at SUNY Cortland

Customer Overview

Spanning 191 acres atop one of the rolling hills in central New York’s “City of Seven Valleys,” the State University of New York College at Cortland was founded in 1868 as the Cortland Normal School. The original campus, located in downtown Cortland, was destroyed by a fire in 1919. The present campus opened in 1923. Over the decades, the campus expanded and in 1941, by an act of the legislature and the Board of Regents, the institution officially became a four-year college providing courses leading to the bachelor’s degree. In 1948, Cortland became a founding member of the State University of New York.

Key Benefits:

  • Strong disaster recovery solution
  • Seamless integration with Veritas Net Backup Exec
  • Simple installation & management
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Failing IT Infrastructure Led to Slow, Inconsistent Backups

SUNY Cortland’s IT department had been struggling with its aging tape-based backup infrastructure for quite some time. “Our backups were taking increasingly longer to complete, failing, and timing out. Workarounds became time-consuming such as breaking up backup jobs into smaller subsets and the like,” said Jim Durr, systems administrator at SUNY Cortland.

The university remedied the situation with the purchase of a two-site disk-based backup system with data deduplication system from ExaGrid. The second site enables replication from the first site, providing for disaster recovery. The ExaGrid system works along with the college’s existing backup application, Veritas Backup Exec.

"When we had a drive fail, it was as easy as a replacement being delivered to my desk. I simply swapped the faulty drive with the new one and shipped the faulty one back to ExaGrid with no interruption in our backups. "

Jim Durr, Systems Administrator

Data Deduplication Approach Reduces Disk Space, Maximizes Efficiency

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).

Fast Installation, Helpful Customer Support

Durr said that installation was fairly simple. They mounted the appliance and worked with ExaGrid’s customer support engineer help them with some network issues on their end. “When we had a drive fail, it was as easy as a replacement being delivered to my desk. I simply swapped the faulty drive with the new one and shipped the faulty one back to ExaGrid with no interruption in our backups,” said Durr.

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. In addition, ExaGrid appliances can replicate to a second ExaGrid appliance at a second site or to the public cloud for DR (disaster recovery).

Scalability to Meet Future Backup Demands

The ExaGrid system can easily scale to accommodate data growth. ExaGrid’s software makes the system highly scalable – appliances of any size or age can be mixed and matched in a single system. A single scale-out system can take in up to a 2.7PB full backup plus retention at an ingest rate of up to 488TB per hour. ExaGrid appliances contain not just disk but also processing power, memory, and bandwidth. When the system needs to expand, additional appliances are simply added to the existing system. The system scales linearly, maintaining a fixed-length backup window as data grows so customers only pay for what they need, when they need it. Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing Repository Tier with automatic load balancing and global deduplication across all repositories.

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).

ExaGrid and Veritas Backup Exec

Veritas Backup Exec provides cost-effective, high-performance backup and recovery – including continuous data protection for Microsoft Exchange servers, Microsoft SQL servers, file servers, and workstations. High-performance agents and options provide fast, flexible, granular protection and scalable management of local and remote server backups.

Organizations using Veritas Backup Exec can look to ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage for nightly backups. ExaGrid sits behind existing backup applications, such as Veritas Backup Exec, providing faster and more reliable backups and restores. In a network running Veritas Backup Exec, using ExaGrid is 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 ExaGrid for backup to disk.

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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