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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid Helps The SIGMA Group Deliver On SLAs for Backup Services

Customer Overview

The SIGMA Group, located in France, is a digital services company, specialized in software publishing, integration of tailor-made digital solutions, and outsourcing of information systems and cloud solutions. It supports the digital transformation of its customers and bases its value proposition on the complementarity of its trades, allowing end-to-end support on the IT projects of its customers: working upstream on business challenges, developing in short micro cycle services, and hosting them in its data centers or on cloud platforms to accelerate the dissemination of solutions to the end user.

Key Benefits:

  • INFIDIS recommends ExaGrid for replication of backups to DR site for enhanced data protection
  • The SIGMA Group’s backup windows cut in half after switch to ExaGrid
  • ExaGrid system easily scales to keep up with The SIGMA Group’s customer data growth
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ExaGrid Simplifies Replication and Provides Optimal Restoration

The SIGMA Group is a managed service provider (MSP) that offers IT and cloud solutions to its customers. The company relies on a strong backup solution to protect both the company’s data and customer data. The SIGMA Group had been backing data up to direct-attached storage (DAS) servers using Veritas NetBackup, and later switched to Veeam, to optimize backups of virtual servers. A major component of the IT services that The SIGMA Group provides to ensure data protection through replication of backups to a remote data center for disaster recovery (DR). The IT staff at The SIGMA Company found that replication was complicated to manage using Veeam, so they reached out to their IT vendor, INFIDIS, who recommended installing ExaGrid systems at the company’s data centers to handle replication and store backups.

“Using ExaGrid allows us to provide high-quality backup services to our customers,” said Mickaël Collet, cloud architect at The SIGMA Group. “We guarantee high SLAs especially on backup services and ExaGrid helps us to deliver on those. Our backup services include performance commitments on restorations and ExaGrid’s Landing Zone allows us to keep the freshest data in a non-deduplicated format to guarantee
optimal restoration performance.”

The SIGMA Group’s IT staff have been impressed that backups are shorter and that data is able to restored to quickly, using ExaGrid and Veeam as a combined solution. “Our backup windows have been cut in half and have remained stable even as data grows, as we have added more ExaGrid appliances to our system,” said Alexandre Chaillou, infrastructure manager at The SIGMA Group. “We are able to restore data from ExaGrid’s Landing Zone in just minutes, using Veeam Instant VM Recovery,” he added.

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).

"Our backup services include performance commitments on restorations and ExaGrid’s Landing Zone allows us to keep the freshest data in a non-deduplicated format to guarantee optimal restoration performance. "

Mickaël Collet, Cloud Architect

Scalable System Keeps Up With Customer Data Growth

In addition to The SIGMA Group’s own data, the company is also responsible for backing up 650TB of customer data, which is backed up in daily incrementals, as well as weekly and monthly fulls. The IT staff have found that ExaGrid’s unique scale-out architecture has been helpful in keeping up with growing data. “We need to adjust capacity as closely as possible to customer needs and not have to oversize backup infrastructures based on growth forecasts,” said Alexandre. “We started with two ExaGrid systems, with one appliance at our primary data center and one at our remote data center. We expanded our two ExaGrid systems, which now are made up of 14 ExaGrid appliances. ExaGrid’s scale-out approach allows us to add capacity while making it possible to only add what is needed.”

ExaGrid’s award-winning scale-out architecture provides customers with a fixed-length backup window regardless of data growth. Its unique disk-cache Landing Zone allows for the fastest backups and retains the most recent backup in its full undeduplicated form, enabling the fastest restores. ExaGrid’s appliance models can be mixed and matched into a single scale-out system allowing a full backup of up to 2.7PB with a combined ingest rate of 488TB/hr, in a single system. The appliances automatically join the scale-out system. Each appliance includes the appropriate amount of processor, memory, disk, and bandwidth for the data size. By adding compute with capacity, the backup window remains fixed in length as the data grows. Automatic load balancing across all repositories allows for full utilization of all appliances. Data is deduplicated into an offline repository, and additionally, data is globally deduplicated across all repositories. This combination of capabilities in a turnkey appliance makes the ExaGrid system easy to install, manage, and scale. ExaGrid’s architecture provides lifetime value and investment protection that no other architecture can match.

Responsive Customer Support

The IT staff at The SIGMA Group appreciate ExaGrid’s customer support model. “ExaGrid support is very responsive and we like that we can speak to the same person each time we call,” said Mickaël. “We have found the system easy to manage, which saves on staff time.”

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.

About INFIDIS

INFIDIS is a 20-year-old global IT integrator and solutions provider that is in line with industry leaders. Its solution architects and engineers design, build, deliver and manage IT solutions and services for customers of all sizes and from a wide variety of industries. INFIDIS help customers to adapt their infrastructures to the requirements of their businesses by offering them high-performance and secure solutions for the optimization of data centers in heterogeneous environments. INFIDIS offers an end-to-end support, independent of constructors and editors and based on a large ecosystem of skills, supplying all the necessary bricks to the building of the base of the new generation of infrastructures.

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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