ExaGrid Chosen for Scale-out Architecture
The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) offers more than 50 liberal arts and professional programs through seven schools to its approximately 7,000 full-time undergraduate students. Downtime is not part of the curriculum. Associate Director for Enterprise Infrastructure, Chris Larthey, has been with the school for more than 20 years, and overseeing the institution’s IT infrastructure, including its backup storage, is his core responsibility.
Throughout his tenure, Larthey has had experience with a variety of backup solutions, and when it was time to make a change, he did his homework. “We had been backing up using Veeam to a Dell Data Domain that was going end-of-life within a year, so we were looking for a replacement for the storage. I wanted to improve upon the ability to scale and have redundancy, which the Data Domain solution did not offer. When they go end-of-life, there’s nothing you can do to extend the operating system on those.”
Working with his IT services provider, Larthey met with several vendors to evaluate different backup solutions. After the provider recommended ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage, he was quickly convinced. “After the initial sit-down with ExaGrid, I was really impressed with everything they were saying about its features, and it checked all the boxes for what I was looking for.”
The ExaGrid system also offered the scalability his team was searching for. “The scale-out architecture was really important,” he said. “It solved the issue that we had faced with the inline deduplication appliances we had used prior to ExaGrid: that either we couldn’t add storage to the system, or the underlying OS for the system became end-of-life, and we could no longer use it.”
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.