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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Legal Services Firm Reduces Backup Times by 84% with ExaGrid-Veeam Accelerated Data Mover

Customer Overview

U.S. Legal Support, Inc. was founded in 1996 and is a privately held company with over 45 offices located across the United States. As one of the leading providers of litigation services, U.S. Legal Support is the only litigation support company that provides court reporting, record retrieval, litigation, eDiscovery, and trial services to major insurance companies, corporations, and law firms nationwide.

Key Benefits:

  • Tight integration between ExaGrid and Veeam provides the fastest possible backups
  • Backup times for a synthetic full reduced from 48+ hours to just 6 to 8 hours
  • Data deduplication is done initially by Veeam and then again by ExaGrid to optimize disk space
  • Reduced network resources are used when running synthetic full backups
  • Scalable system easily expands with growing data volumes
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Move Away from the Cloud Prompted Search for New Backup Solution

U.S. Legal Support has large databases that contain audio and video files of depositions and exhibits from court cases that are cross-indexed and available for purchase by legal teams. When the company decided to consolidate its datacenter operations and move them in-house after a few years of outsourcing to the cloud, one of its IT staff’s main challenges was to find the best way to cost-effectively back up its data in excess of 100TB. “We discovered that two of the big problems with hosted storage are cost and speed, especially if your data is in the multi-terabyte range and higher,” said Ryan McClain, systems architect at U.S. Legal Support.

“We were spending more than $3,000 per month for 30TB of backup storage with one of our providers. We tried to back up to the cloud, but once we hit the 30TB mark, we couldn’t back up the data fast enough, even though we were using a 200MB connection. Then, if an error occurred, we’d have to start all over again. It was horrible and extremely time-consuming.”

"Our backup times are so much faster using Veeam with the ExaGrid system… We back up and protect a tremendous amount of data using Veeam and ExaGrid, and the solution has more than exceeded our expectations. "

Ryan McClain, Systems Architect

Case Made with ExaGrid’s Speed, Tight Integration with Veeam, and Ability to Store 116TB of Data in 30TB of Space

After initially attempting to back up some of its data locally to NAS boxes, U.S. Legal Support’s IT staff decided to look more seriously at disk-based backup appliances. The team looked at several different solutions, and eventually chose ExaGrid due to its ability to provide fast backups, effective deduplication, and tight integration with Veeam, the company’s existing backup application. 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.

Synthetic Full Backup Times of 48+ Hours Reduced to 6-8 Hours

ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover so that backups are written Veeam-to-Veeam versus Veeam-to-CIFS, which provides a 30% increase in backup performance. Since the Veeam Data Mover is not an open standard, it is far more secure than using CIFS and other open market protocols. In addition, because ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover, Veeam synthetic fulls can be created six times faster than any other solution. ExaGrid stores the most recent Veeam backups in an undeduplicated form in its Landing Zone and has the Veeam Data Mover running on each ExaGrid appliance and has a processor in each appliance in a scale-out architecture. This combination of Landing Zone, Veeam Data Mover, and scale-out compute provides the fastest Veeam synthetic fulls versus any other solution on the market.

McClain reports that U.S. Legal Support’s backup times are considerably faster using Veeam and the ExaGrid system. The company used to perform a synthetic full backup to its NAS device over a 24- 48 hour period, depending upon the type of data being backed up. With Veeam and the ExaGrid system, the same synthetic full backup jobs now take just six to eight hours. And not only are backup windows reduced, but according to McClain, U.S. Legal also reaps the benefit of reduced network resources consumed during the synthetic full backup job session when using the data mover. In addition, he found that the process of switching from CIFS to the ExaGrid-Veeam Accelerated Data Mover was straightforward.

Adaptive Deduplication Provides Optimal Recovery Point

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.

“Our backup times are so much faster using Veeam with the ExaGrid system,” said McClain. “Other benefits have been stability and reliability. Because the ExaGrid is a purpose-built system and not a general purpose NAS box, backups run more consistently and trouble-free than before. I spend three to six fewer hours per week dealing with backup issues.”

Scale-out Architecture Provides Superior Scalability

ExaGrid’s scalable architecture will enable U.S. Legal Support to expand the system as its backup requirements grow. “We migrated to Cisco UCS servers and Nimble Storage devices, both of which are extremely scalable, and we were backing up to these NAS devices that weren’t easy to expand. Having the ExaGrid systems in place completes the picture, so now our backup infrastructure can easily grow with our backup demands,” McClain 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.

Support Engineer Assigned to Account Provides Top-notch Assistance

McClain said that he finds the ExaGrid system easy to maintain and manage, and he’s been surprised at the high level of customer support offered by the company. “I’ve been very pleased with ExaGrid support. We were assigned a support engineer who monitors the health of our backups and the system itself, and when we have a question, he’s easy to reach and knowledgeable,” 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.

“Installing the ExaGrid system has been a time and stress saver. We back up and protect a tremendous amount of data using Veeam and ExaGrid, and the solution has more than exceeded our expectations.”

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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