U.S. Capitol Visitor Center

U.S. Capitol Visitor Center Installs ExaGrid Disk-Based Backup

Customer Overview

The U.S. Capitol Visitor Center provides a welcoming and educational environment for visitors to learn about the unique characteristics of the House and the Senate and the legislative process as well as the history and development of the architecture and art of the U.S. Capitol. The U.S. Capitol Visitor Center is the newest addition to the historic Capitol Complex. At nearly 580,000 square feet, the Visitor Center is the largest project in the Capitol’s more than two-century history and is approximately three-quarters the size of the Capitol itself. The entire facility is located underground on the east side of the Capitol so as not to detract from the appearance of the Capitol and the grounds.

Key Benefits:

Simple installation
Automated replication
Support of existing backup application, Veritas NetBackup
Superior deduplication maximizes capacity

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Straightforward Installation with Automated Replication, Deduplication Maximizes Capacity

When IT specialist Tony Daneshvaziri began working at the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center (CVC), the ExaGrid disk-based backup system was in place but wasn’t completely installed. The system had already been racked and mounted, so, the remainder of the installation work was pretty straightforward. “It was very simple – there was nothing to it,” he said.

At CVC, there are two ExaGrid systems. One is kept in the primary data center and the second one, located in another part of the building, is used for replication. “Here at CVC, we use Veritas NetBackup as our backup application, which writes our backup data to the ExaGrid system.” According to Daneshvaziri, a full backup takes about half a day to complete. He reports a high deduplication ratio with the ExaGrid system, the advantage of which is space savings.

"Installing ExaGrid was very simple – there was nothing to it. "

Tony Daneshvaziri, IT Specialist

ExaGrid Customer Support is ‘Right There’

Daneshvaziri has found the system to be very easy to manage and says he receives good customer support from ExaGrid. Having the ExaGrid system at CVC has been “a very good experience. We haven’t had any big problems, but when we’ve had small ones, they’ve been resolved by customer support very fast,” said Daneshvaziri. “Any time I call, our customer support engineer is right there.”

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.

Scalability to Grow with Data Growth

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.

Easy to Install and Maintain

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).

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 NetBackup

Veritas NetBackup delivers high-performance data protection that scales to protect the largest enterprise environments. ExaGrid is integrated with and certified by Veritas in 9 areas, including Accelerator, AIR, single disk pool, analytics, and other areas to ensure full support of NetBackup. ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage offers the fastest backups, the fastest restores, and the only true scale-out solution as data grows to provide a fixed-length backup window and a non-network-facing tier (tiered air gap) for recovery from a ransomware event.

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 2.7PB full backup in a single system.

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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story