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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid Resolves Backup Window Issues and Provides Peace of Mind for Swiftness LTD’s IT Staff

Customer Overview

Swiftness LTD is the developer and operator of Israel’s Ministry of Finance’s pension clearinghouse. The pension clearinghouse, a project initiated by the Israel Ministry of Finance, offers a digital platform that every Israeli citizen can use to receive a complete, up-to-date picture of their accrued pension savings. The clearinghouse transfers all information from insurance, pension and savings fund agencies, insurance agents and financial consultants.

Key Benefits:

  • Swiftness LTD switches to ExaGrid for better integration with Veeam
  • SQL data backed up directly to ExaGrid
  • Backup window issues resolved after switch to ExaGrid
  • ExaGrid provides ‘best’ customer support and ‘peace of mind’
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ExaGrid-Veeam Integration Provides Secure Backups

The IT staff at Swiftness LTD had been backing up the clearinghouse’s data to tape and to local IBM SATA storage, using Veeam. As the IT staff ran into capacity issues, they decided to look into a new backup solution, and wanted to find one that offered better performance and speed, as well as greater security.

“We wanted to protect ourselves from malware that encrypts data. Our storage provider recommended ExaGrid to us for better data protection,” said Benjamin Sebagh, who works with system network and infrastructure at Swiftness LTD.

“As we researched ExaGrid, we found many success stories about companies who had improved their backups after switching to ExaGrid from an older solution. Our older IBM storage did not integrate with Veeam, and we had used SMB protocol for backup which was less secure. We don’t need to open the SMB protocol anymore since ExaGrid and Veeam integrate so well together, said Jeremy Langer, IT Manager at Swiftness LTD.

ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover so that backups are written Veeam-to-Veeam versus Veeam-to-CIFS, which provides a 30% increase in backup performance. Since the Veeam Data Mover is not an open standard, it is far more secure than using CIFS and other open market protocols. In addition, because ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover, Veeam synthetic fulls can be created six times faster than any other solution. ExaGrid stores the most recent Veeam backups in an undeduplicated form in its Landing Zone and has the Veeam Data Mover running on each ExaGrid appliance and has a processor in each appliance in a scale-out architecture. This combination of Landing Zone, Veeam Data Mover, and scale-out compute provides the fastest Veeam synthetic fulls versus any other solution on the market.

"We wanted to protect ourselves from malware that encrypts data. Our storage provider recommended ExaGrid to us for better data protection. "

Benjamin Sebagh, System Network and Infrastructure

Swiftness LTD Backs Up SQL Data Directly to ExaGrid

The IT staff at Swiftness LTD appreciate ExaGrid’s flexibility in supporting multiple backup applications and utilities. “We back up our encrypted SQL database directly to our ExaGrid system and use Veeam to back up or VMs,” said Sebagh.

ExaGrid allows multiple approaches within the same environment. An organization can use one backup application for its physical servers, a different backup application or utility for its virtual environment, and also perform direct Microsoft SQL or Oracle RMAN database dumps – all to the same ExaGrid system. This approach allows customers to use the backup application and utilities of their choosing, use best-of-breed backup applications and utilities, and choose the right backup application and utility for each specific use case.

Switch to ExaGrid Resolves Backup Window Issues

Sebagh backs up Swiftness LTD’s data in daily incrementals with weekly synthetic fulls, in addition to select data that is backed up monthly and yearly for long-term retention, and he has noticed that backups are much faster since switching to ExaGrid. “Before using ExaGrid, we had issues with backup jobs not finishing in time, which would result in Veeam stopping the jobs when they approached the given timeframe. Those backup window issues stopped once we started using ExaGrid,” he said. “We’ve been able to restore data easily, without any issues. It’s a very fast process, using the ExaGrid-Veeam solution,” he added.

“While our previous solution allowed us to take advantage of deduplication, we never had the benefit of ExaGrid’s Landing Zone or its Adaptive Deduplication, so the data was compressed and deduplicated before it was written to storage. Now with ExaGrid, our backups are very fast because the data goes straight to the Landing Zone. We think it’s the best feature of the ExaGrid system,” said Sebagh.

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).

ExaGrid and Veeam can instantly recover a file or VMware virtual machine by running it directly from the ExaGrid appliance in the event that the file is lost, corrupted or encrypted or the primary storage VM becomes unavailable. This instant recovery is possible because of ExaGrid’s Landing Zone – a high-speed disk cache on the ExaGrid appliance that retains the most recent backups in their complete form. Once the primary storage environment has been brought back to a working state, the VM backed up on the ExaGrid appliance can then be migrated to primary storage for continued operation.

ExaGrid Provides ‘Best Support’ and ‘Peace of Mind’

Sebagh and Langer both appreciate ExaGrid’s support model of working with an assigned level 2 engineer. “Any time we’ve had a question or run into an issue, we’ve had the pleasure of working with our ExaGrid support engineer, who speaks French, which makes it so much easier to work with him. He always responds to us quickly, too. ExaGrid provides the best support of all the providers we have. It gives us peace of mind, which is very important to our job,” said Sebagh.

“We also like that ExaGrid provides secure remote support, making it very easy for our support engineer to update the software as needed,” said Langer. “That’s another great thing about using ExaGrid – the product’s software is updated regularly. It’s not like other devices that we’ve used which have seemed dead because we waited for years for an update.”

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. Customer’s 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.

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