10X More Data Backed Up, in Shorter Windows
Now that the department has implemented the ExaGrid-Veeam solution, backup services have been able to be expanded to the entire university, which has resulted in a diversity of data to back up, from desktops to servers. The data is backed up on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, depending on how critical it is. Romo and his staff have found that the new solution allows for a more regular backup schedule.
“Our backup windows used to be very long, ranging from many hours to even days, which made it difficult to keep a regular backup schedule. Now that we use the ExaGrid-Veeam solution, our backup window has been cut down to a few hours and the backups are reliable and stay on schedule,” he said.
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).
In addition to shorter backup windows, the department has been able to triple the retention of the backups that are kept, from a single copy to three copies. “Switching to the ExaGrid-Veeam solution has saved us on both time and storage resources,” said Romo. “We’re able to back up ten times more than our prior capacity, due to the deduplication we are getting.”
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.