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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

BioTissue Adds ExaGrid as a Backup Target for Veeam, Automates Offsite Replication for DR

Customer Overview

BioTissue is the leader in innovative technologies using products derived from human amniotic and umbilical cord tissues. Since its inception in 1997, the Company has pioneered the clinical application of human placental tissues – more than 680,000 patients have been treated with BioTissue products and the Company’s groundbreaking scientific and clinical achievements have been documented in more than 390 peer-reviewed publications.

Key Benefits:

  • Daily backups 75% faster
  • Entire infrastructure now backed up by ExaGrid-Veeam
  • Retention meets internal policy due to data deduplication maximizing storage capacity
  • Reliable ExaGrid-Veeam solution ‘one less thing to worry about’
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Company Seeks Automated Offsite Replication

BioTissue had been using Veeam to back up its data to a local disk array and wanted to also replicate to offsite storage for disaster recovery (DR) without manual intervention. ExaGrid was recommended as a solution that works well with Veeam, so BioTissue installed ExaGrid systems both at its primary data center as well as its offsite DR location. Victor Elvir, systems administrator at BioTissue, was glad that ExaGrid supported the existing backup application. “We already had the licensing for Veeam and didn’t want to replace our backup application, so it was great that ExaGrid supports it.”

The ExaGrid system is easy to install and use and works seamlessly with the industry’s leading backup applications so that an organization can retain its investment in its existing backup applications and processes. In addition, ExaGrid appliances can replicate to a second ExaGrid appliance at a second site or to the public cloud for DR (disaster recovery).

"One of the best things about ExaGrid is its simplicity. It’s been straightforward to use since installation and it just works. We didn’t have to do any fancy configurations in Veeam, which instantly identified ExaGrid as a repository. We haven’t had to do any guesswork and everything has been very intuitive. "

Victor Elvir Systems Administrator

ExaGrid Meets Retention Policy while Protecting Entire Infrastructure

BioTissue’s environment is mostly virtualized, consisting of 60 virtual machines (VMs) and 9 physical servers. Elvir backs up the Company’s data in daily incrementals and a weekly synthetic full. Before switching to ExaGrid, he was only able to back up the virtual infrastructure, leaving the physical servers unprotected.

The switch to ExaGrid allowed BioTissue to back up its entire infrastructure and also increased its retention from one week to two weeks’ worth of data, which ensures that the Company’s internal retention policy is met. “Deduplication has been even better than we expected. We no longer worry about storage or need to keep an eye on how much capacity is being used. We’ve never had less than 30% of free space available thanks to the data deduplication with ExaGrid and Veeam,” said Elvir.

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.

ExaGrid-Veeam Combined Dedupe

Veeam uses changed block tracking to perform a level of data deduplication. ExaGrid allows Veeam deduplication and Veeam dedupe-friendly compression to stay on. ExaGrid will increase Veeam’s deduplication by a factor of about 7:1 to a total combined deduplication ratio of 14:1, reducing the storage required and saving on storage costs up front and over time.

Daily Backup Window 75% Shorter

Elvir has been impressed with ExaGrid’s impact on daily backups. “Our backups are significantly faster. Daily incrementals used to take up to 5 hours, and now the backup window is just under 1.25 hours.” Fortunately, Elvir hasn’t had to restore data yet, but feels confident that he’ll be able to when needed. “During our quarterly DR testing, we have been able to restore our backups in minutes. It’s such a simple process: right-click, hit restore, and everything is up and running.”

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 +Veeam =“One Less Thing to Worry About”

Elvir appreciates how easy it is to manage his ExaGrid system and how well it integrates with Veeam. “One of the best things about ExaGrid is its simplicity. It’s been straightforward to use since installation and it just works. We didn’t have to do any fancy configurations in Veeam, which instantly identified ExaGrid as a repository. We haven’t had to do any guesswork, and everything has been very intuitive. We’re a pretty small shop here; it’s just us two systems administrators. We do anything we can to simplify our environment and processes, and we’re happy that ExaGrid is reliable—it’s one less thing that we have to worry about.”

The prompt assistance provided by ExaGrid customer support is one of the benefits of using the ExaGrid system that Elvir values most. “At one point, one of our drives failed, and I emailed my ExaGrid support engineer as I was leaving the office. When I arrived at the office the next morning, the replacement was already there, and all I needed to do was swap it out. Honestly, we feel like the support with ExaGrid has been the best part of the whole system,” he said.

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.

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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