PrimeSys Delivers a Simpler, Cost-Effective, and Secure Solution
The Trust’s IT team decided to look for a backup solution that would simplify their backup environment and looked to their trusted IT consultants at PrimeSys to advise them, who suggested the Trust look into ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage.
“PrimeSys is a specialist in data protection and recovery, and we’ve been working in the backup industry for over 20 years,” said Ian Curry, director at PrimeSys Ltd. “ExaGrid’s architecture with its high-performance Landing Zone and very efficient long-term data repository is quite unique in the market. We knew it was going to be a good solution to fix the immediate issues, but also it would give the Trust a cost-effective way to scale and expand going forward, as well.
“We’ve seen a lot of take-up in public sector with ExaGrid, with its modular approach that allows customers like the Trust to scale in a way that allows for a good return on investment from the
asset. Traditionally in backup storage you buy a system, then after three to five years later it reaches its end of life, so you have to keep redesigning and replacing every three to five years. We know ExaGrid provides a long-term solution, because new appliances can be added alongside existing ExaGrid systems as time goes on, with a non-obsolescence policy that means that customers are getting five to seven or even more years of utilization,” said Curry.
In addition to improved backup and restore performance, ExaGrid’s comprehensive security and ransomware recovery features were another reason that PrimeSys suggested that the Trust look
into ExaGrid.
“At PrimeSys, we’re very aware that our customers in the NHS are concerned about and security and ransomware impacting backups. We wanted to present a solution we could be confident would secure the backups of the Trust. ExaGrid has a great range of features to secure the system, including role-based administration, multifactor authentication, encryption of data at rest and
in transit, and the Retention Time-Lock (RTL) feature which makes backups immutable so they can’t be altered and so they can’t be affected by ransomware. That was another key reason we
suggested ExaGrid,” said Curry.
ExaGrid appliances have a network-facing, disk cache Landing Zone where the most recent backups are stored in an undeduplicated format for fast backup and restore performance. Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing tier called the Repository Tier, where recent and retention deduplicated data is stored for longer-term retention. The combination of a non-network facing tier (tiered air gap) plus delayed deletes and immutable data objects guards against the backup data being deleted or encrypted. ExaGrid’s offline tier is ready for recovery in the event of an attack.