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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Trenam Law Gains Cost Savings and Better Backup Times with ExaGrid

Customer Overview

Trenam Law is a recognized leader among Florida’s premier law firms; ranking among the top law firms in size and breadth of practice. Founded in 1970, Trenam has evolved to meet the changing needs of their clients. Their flexibility has allowed the firm to develop and retain clients, both large and small, across a wide range of industries including real estate, banking, manufacturing, financial services, hospitality, construction, and technology.

Key Benefits:

  • Full backup times reduced from 48 hours to 12
  • Data dedupe rates as high as 60:1
  • IT department is saves a considerable amount of time on management and administration
  • Responsive and knowledgeable support
  • Strong integration with Veritas Backup Exec
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Desire to Eliminate Long Backup Times, Costly Tape Led to ExaGrid

The IT department at Trenam Law had grown tired of long backup times and dealing with tape. Weekly full backups stretched to nearly 48 hours and often ran into the work week, causing the firm’s network to slow down. In addition, tape was becoming increasingly unreliable, expensive, and labor intensive.

“We were having lots of issues with our backups,” said Lori Jones, IT manager at Trenham Law. “Our full backups required 15 tapes, and we had to go to our co location facility every Friday before 6:00 p.m. to change out the tapes. It was difficult because we often perform upgrades and other maintenance on our systems on Fridays. It was also a physical challenge to bring all 15 tapes back, catalogue them, and send them to offsite storage. We were spending $200 a month on offsite storage and transportation alone. We finally decided to look for a solution that would shorten our backup times and reduce our reliance on tape.”

After looking at several different solutions, Trenam eventually chose a disk-based backup system with data deduplication from ExaGrid. The ExaGrid system works in conjunction with the firm’s existing backup application, Veritas Backup Exec. “After speaking with existing ExaGrid customers who had similar challenges and hearing them rave about the system, we did our own research and decided that it was the right solution for us,” said Jones. “One consideration was that we didn’t have to change our backup application. We could slide the ExaGrid right into our existing infrastructure.”

"Our backups are now running well within our backup window, we have a higher level of data security and we’ve saved a considerable amount of time and money that we used to spend on tape. "

Lori Jones, IT Manager

Full Backup Times Reduced from 48 hours to 12 Hours, Data Deduplication Maximizes Disk Space

Since installing the ExaGrid system, the firm’s full backup times have been reduced from approximately 48 hours to just 12. “Our backups absolutely fly now with the ExaGrid,” Jones said.

“There’s just no comparison to tape.” Jones said that ExaGrid’s data deduplication technology has been very effective in reducing the amount of data stored on the system. “Our data deduplication ratios vary depending upon the type of data being stored, but we have some rates as high as 60:1. We’re able to store approximately 20TB of data in just under 4TB of space,” she said. “It’s wonderful to have so much data at our fingertips and ready to restore. Tape was unreliable when it came to restoring data and it was a pain to deal with. We now have a much higher level of security just knowing that our data will be there if we need it.”

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).

Firm Saves Time and Money with ExaGrid

Russ Hoffacker, a consultant with Tribridge, a Tampa-based IT consulting firm, helped install the ExaGrid system and continues to work with the system today. Hoffacker said that the ExaGrid system was easy to install, and the firm’s IT department is saving a considerable amount of time on management and administration.

“Installing the ExaGrid system was surprisingly simple. There’s always some kind of technical challenge or hurdle to jump through during an installation but not with the ExaGrid. It was extremely straightforward and took no time at all. We just set it up and put it on autopilot,” he said. “The firm is also saving a lot of time on management and administration now that we don’t have to deal with tape. Before, we spent a lot of time setting up backup jobs, checking them and rescheduling jobs because they didn’t run properly. We were probably spending half a day on Monday and another five hours later in the week on other maintenance. Now, we spend about 15 minutes a week on management, and we don’t have to transport tapes back and forth from our co-location facility.”

The firm has also been able to significantly reduce the cost of its backups with ExaGrid. In addition to the hours saved on maintenance, Trenam Law had been spending $200 per month for offsite tape storage along with the cost of the tapes themselves.

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. “ExaGrid’s customer support team has been wonderful. They’re always responsive and knowledgeable, and I know I can look to them when I have a question,” said Jones.

Scalability to Grow

The ExaGrid system can easily scale to accommodate data growth. ExaGrid’s software makes the system highly scalable – appliances of any size or age can be mixed and matched in a single system. A single scale-out system can take in up to a 2.7PB full backup plus retention at an ingest rate of up to 488TB per hour.

ExaGrid appliances contain not just disk but also processing power, memory, and bandwidth. When the system needs to expand, additional appliances are simply added to the existing system. The system scales linearly, maintaining a fixed-length backup window as data grows so customers only pay for what they need, when they need it. Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing Repository Tier with automatic load balancing and global deduplication across all repositories.

“The ExaGrid system is extremely scalable. It’s a solution that will serve us well for a long time.” said Jones. “Installing the ExaGrid was the answer to our backup issues. Our backups are now running well within our backup window, we have a higher level of data security, and we’ve saved a considerable amount of time and money that we used to spend on tape. It has been a terrific solution for us.”

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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