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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Township of King Improves Data Protection with ExaGrid-Veeam Solution

The Township of King in Ontario, Canada is just 45 minutes from the rush of downtown Toronto and with so much to do you’ll keep falling for King all season long! Enjoy farm visits and harvests, picturesque country drives through the rolling hills to see fall colors, golfing, hiking, cycling, art galleries, accommodations, and fine dining.

Key Benefits:

  • Switch to ExaGrid raises confidence in data protection
  • ExaGrid-Veeam solution improves backup and restore performance
  • ExaGrid provides expert and responsive customer support
  • RTL ensures Township of King’s data can be recovered in case of a ransomware attack
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An End to the Backup Nightmare

Barbara Harris, Manager of Information Technology, has been working for the Township of King for more than 19 years. Before switching to ExaGrid, Harris had used an alternative storage solution to back up the Township’s data, and had experienced many issues.

“The storage solution was a nightmare. We continuously had problems with it since the day we bought it. I think we got a lemon, so that was very frustrating. At night, I couldn’t sleep because I was so worried about our backups and our data. It was brutal. I was constantly dealing with patches and repairs,” said Harris.

The Township’s IT solutions vendor knew Harris was looking for an innovative storage solution that integrated well with the environment’s existing backup app, Veeam, so they recommended ExaGrid. The ExaGrid team worked with Harris to properly size the correct ExaGrid system for the Township’s unique environment and to resolve all of the backup issues that had been experienced with the previous solution. “I met with the ExaGrid team and they helped me fully understand how the product worked—and the rest is history. I now have a solution I believe in. Working with the ExaGrid team has been wonderful,” she said.

From the beginning, Harris had a very different experience using ExaGrid than with her previous solution. “The installation of our ExaGrid system went very well,” she said. “I found our assigned ExaGrid support engineer’s knowledge of both ExaGrid and Veeam to be very consistent. He configured our ExaGrid system to be optimal with Veeam settings.”

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.

"ExaGrid is standing up to everything that the sales team pitched to us. There's nothing more frustrating than being oversold on technology, only to be disappointed after purchase."

Barbara Harris, Manager of Information Technology

ExaGrid-Veeam Solution Protects Township’s Critical Data

Harris backs up the Township’s data regularly, which consists of all types of data—including taxation software, water-billing software, public records, building permits, planning applications, public works documents, road information, GIS data, and marriage licenses—critical data is required to keep their municipality operational.

She has been impressed with the backup and restore performance that the combined ExaGrid-Veeam provides. “When I have needed to restore VMs from the ExaGrid system, the speed of restoration has increased incredibly from this product.”

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.

Keeping up with Retention Requirements and Expectations

The ExaGrid-Veeam combined deduplication provides storage savings to accommodate long-term retention. “We have strict data retention by law, which pertains to all our records. Right now, within the records management system, different records have different retention periods,” said Harris.

“The compression and deduplication ratios are fantastic with ExaGrid, and backups are much faster than they had been with our prior solution. ExaGrid is standing up to everything that the sales team pitched to us. There’s nothing more frustrating than being oversold on technology, only to be disappointed after purchase.”

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.

A Backup Solution with Built-In Ransomware Recovery

Harris is pleased that with ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage includes comprehensive security with ransomware recovery. “I am now actually able to sleep at night. ExaGrid has raised my confidence in our data protection. Having the ability to access data from ExaGrid’s Repository Tier is comforting as bad actors would not be able to hack into that. If a ransomware attack was identified, I can simply recover and restore all my backup data.”

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, for longer-term retention. ExaGrid’s unique architecture and features provide comprehensive security including Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery (RTL), and through the combination of a non-network-facing tier (tiered air gap), a delayed delete policy, and immutable data objects, backup data is protected from being deleted or encrypted. ExaGrid’s offline tier is ready for recovery in the event of an attack.

World-Class Support

Harris is impressed with the level of customer support that ExaGrid provides. “Our support engineer is so knowledgeable, responsive, and always there to help. I could not ask for more.”

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.

Unique Scale-Out Architecture

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.

ExaGrid and Veeam 

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.

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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