Thomas Langley Medical Center

Thomas Langley Medical Center Cures Backup Problems with ExaGrid's Disk Backup with Deduplication Solution

Customer Overview

Langley Health Services (LHS), a Federally Qualified Community Health Center, serves the healthcare needs of patients in central Florida and beyond. LHS has seven sites throughout Sumter, Marion, and Citrus Counties. As a non-profit, 501 (C)(3) organization, LHS offers comprehensive primary healthcare services to patients, regardless of their income level.

Key Benefits:

Seamless integration with Veritas Backup Exec
Backup times reduced from 19 hours to 4 hour
Scalability ensures that they will never outgrow system
ExaGrid’s data deduplication technology significantly reduces the amount of data stored and helps speed backup times.
Very easy to set up and manage, saving a lot of admin time

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Daily Struggle with Manual Backup Processes, Long Backup Times Drove Need for a New Solution

The IT staff at the Langley Health Services (LHS) had been backing up its radiology images, accounting and finance data, and other business information to a virtual server on its storage area network (SAN). However, the process was manual and labor-intensive, and the staff had difficulty keeping up with nightly backups. In addition, the staff was concerned about disaster recovery because the backup data was on the same SAN as its production systems.

“We were using Microsoft NT’s backup utility to copy critical files and data to a file server, but we struggled with it because it was a labor intensive process. We needed a more enterprise-level solution that was more automated and could give us the ability to run multiple backup jobs at once. We also needed to get our backups off the SAN and away from our production systems because we worried that a hardware failure would cause us to lose both our backups and the production systems at the same time,” said Mark Steingart, IT director at Langley Health Services. Backup times were also an issue. Steingart said that since the jobs were run so inefficiently, they were constantly running past TELMC’s backup window.

“We were going over our backup window and were trying to use incremental and differential backups along with weekly full backups but they still weren’t efficient,” he said.

"The ability to reduce the amount of data stored is probably one of the most valuable benefits of the ExaGrid solution. We have a tremendous amount of redundant data here and ExaGrid’s data deduplication probably cuts the total amount of data down to a third. "

Mark Steingart, IT Director

ExaGrid & Backup Exec Deliver Streamlined Backups

After looking at a variety of different backup solutions on the market, the IT staff at TELMC chose an ExaGrid disk-based backup system with data deduplication along with Veritas Backup Exec.

“The ExaGrid and Backup Exec combination is pretty powerful. It’s a very intuitive solution and it gives us a great deal of flexibility in how we structure our backups. Also, restores are incredibly fast. It’s nice to have easy access to so much data if and when we need it,” said Steingart.

“The two products work beautifully together, and our backups are running way faster to disk than they would have to tape.” Since installing the ExaGrid system, Steingart reports that backup times have been reduced from nearly 19 hours to four hours. “Our backup times were all over the place because we were constantly juggling demands. Now, everything is backed up within four hours. It’s quite a relief,” he said

Scalability to Meet Future Backup Demands

Steingart said that one of his favorite features of the ExaGrid system is its scalability. “We really like the fact that the ExaGrid system is so scalable. We’re not worried that we’ll outgrow the system because we can easily add additional capacity if we need to. The ExaGrid is modular, so we can keep adding units for expansion as our backup needs grow,” he said.

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.

Data Deduplication Reduces Amount of Data, Speeds Backups

Steingart said that ExaGrid’s data deduplication technology significantly reduces the amount of data stored and helps speed backup times. “The ability to reduce the amount of data stored is probably one of the most valuable benefits of the ExaGrid solution. We have a tremendous amount of redundant data here and ExaGrid’s data deduplication probably cuts the total amount of data down to a third,” said Steingart. “It also cuts down on the data transfer rate because we’re only writing the portion of the volume that has changed to disk. It enables us to complete a full backup of each server every day.”

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, Reliable Backups

Steingart noted that installing the ExaGrid system was a quick, painless process. 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. Customers never have to repeat themselves to various support staff, and issues get resolved quickly.

“We had the ExaGrid with Backup Exec installed in no time and it really was easy to do. ExaGrid’s customer support team helped us with the initial setup over the phone and we’ve been off and running ever since,” said Steingart. “The ExaGrid is as stable as can be and our backups are completed correctly and without fail each and every night. We’re also saving a lot of time on administrative functions. I only spend ten minutes here and there during the week on management and administration. It frees our staff time up so they can focus on other things.”

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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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story