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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

UH Bristol Keeps CAPEX Spend Predictable, Applies Cost Savings to Patient Care

Customer Overview

University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust 9 (UH Bristol) is a dynamic and thriving group of hospitals in the heart of Bristol, UK, a vibrant and culturally diverse city. UH Bristol has over 9,000 staff who deliver over 100 different types of clinical services across 9 sites. From the neonatal intensive care unit to care of the elderly, UH Bristol provides patient care to the residents of Bristol and the southwest, starting at life’s earliest beginnings to its later stages.

Key Benefits:

  • No obsolescence model protects investment in existing system
  • Price guarantee keeps CAPEX spend predictable
  • ExaGrid-Veeam integration has enabled 85% virtualization
  • Backup window reduced by 95%
  • IT staff spends 25% less time on backup
  • Backup SLAs are consistently met or exceeded
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Cost Savings and ‘No Surprises’ with ExaGrid Price Protection

University Hospitals Bristol (UH Bristol) invested in backup and primary storage infrastructure cyclically. Its spend recurs every 3, 5, and 7 years as infrastructure is ripped and replaced with strict public tender conditions. Investment in ExaGrid has enabled UH Bristol to put an end to its large CAPEX cycle due to ExaGrid’s scalable architecture and no obsolescence model. UH Bristol is able to easily add ExaGrid appliances into the scale-out system for organic growth while keeping its spend under control with ExaGrid’s price guarantee. ExaGrid’s Price Protection Program enables IT organizations to plan up front by allowing future appliances to be purchased at the same price paid for the original appliances, so the future price is known and is fixed. And, because ExaGrid offers various appliance models of different capacities, there is no need to purchase additional capacity up front since it can be added at any time. In addition, ExaGrid’s maintenance and support costs are known up front and guarantees that the annual fee for maintenance and support will not increase by more than 3% per year.

UH Bristol’s intention is to build in blocks, which is exactly why they chose ExaGrid. “We don’t have to replace the whole lot; we can selectively replace parts without sacrificing anything that we’ve already got installed. Scalability, key upgrades, and proper management will allow us to save big on capital expenses,” said Dave Oatway, computer services manager at UH Bristol.

"As a public organisation, we had to go out to tender so we looked at a variety of different solutions, but ExaGrid was the one that provided the best fit for our specification for deep integration with Veeam software whilst providing best value for the money. ExaGrid has been brilliant to work with from pre-sale to post-sale, and we feel very well supported. "

Dave Oatway, Computer Services Manager

Costly Maintenance and Desire to Virtualize Lead to Veeam-ExaGrid

Prior to ExaGrid, UH Bristol’s SANs backed up to another product. “This solution worked very well for a number of years,” said Oatway. “The equipment worked fine, but we were starting to incur maintenance charges, which were quite expensive. As a public organisation, we had to go out to tender so we looked at a variety of different solutions, but ExaGrid was the one that best fit our specification for deep integration with Veeam software whilst providing best value for the money.”

Today, UH Bristol backs up over 180TB of data and is 85% virtualized. “I’m mindful of the fact that ExaGrid and Veeam are both next generation technologies, replacing the legacy solution that we’ve had in service for years. That’s the whole idea of a technology refresh – to examine what’s out there. We look at a technology refresh every five years and try to purchase equipment that we can expand, and the ExaGrid system use case allowed us to target several different types of storage solutions,” said Oatway.

Budget Savings Redirected to Investment in Healthcare

Oatway is pleased with ExaGrid’s maintenance and support guarantee that makes future M&S known up front so that he can plan accordingly. “We’re seeing cost savings because we don’t have to renew the maintenance on our legacy system, but the commitment we have from ExaGrid is that their maintenance cost will be a percentage of what we pay for the appliances, not list price. Also, if we buy any additional appliances over the next five years, the price will be more or less the same as what we paid for the original appliances. We can now redirect that budget savings to other areas, like progressive healthcare applications.”

Backup Window Reduced by up to 95%

Using ExaGrid and Veeam together has drastically reduced the time it takes UH Bristol to complete backup jobs across the board. Backing up UH Bristol’s Exchange servers went from ten hours down to just six, and another 2TB file server that also used to take ten hours to back up now takes just three. “The best example of backup window reduction was our 2TB SQL server that we were backing up to our legacy system, which could take up to 22 hours. We moved the SQL server over to the ExaGrid/ Veeam setup, and it’s down to an hour – a 95% reduction! We consistently meet or exceed our backup SLAs, without question,” said Oatway.

UH Bristol Achieves Goal of Adopting Best Practices from the Outset

Oatway was pleased with how smoothly the installation was. “The ExaGrid support team decided to come down and meet us in person, which we appreciated since we were looking to adopt best practices from the time we got the appliances out of the box. There was a certain amount of knowledge transfer to our staff at the same time, but both the ExaGrid units were in and working within a couple of hours. It was nice to work with an expert, someone very knowledgeable on the product; it was a big step forward for us. It’s easier to get it right from day one using other people’s experience and advice. The whole installation experience was very positive.”

UH Bristol Benefits from ‘Brilliant’ Partnership with ExaGrid

Oatway has found the ExaGrid system easy to use and is pleased that it just works. He’s pleased with the ease of the Veeam implementation and how tight the integration is between the two products. “We haven’t had a single issue to date. ExaGrid gives us confidence in performing our most important task – protecting our data,” 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. Customer’s never have to repeat themselves to various support staff, and issues get resolved quickly.

“Relationships are very important to us. We specifically look for that synergy as we choose partners to work with, and ExaGrid has been brilliant from pre-sale to post-sale. We feel very well supported as we continue to build comfort with the systems. That fact that our ExaGrid sales director is interested in how we’re doing bodes well for the future.”

ExaGrid Architecture Provides Superior Scalability

UH Bristol has a two-site ExaGrid system in the UK, which is used for DR with ExaGrid replication. “We have ExaGrid systems in both of our data centers and replicate the primary site to the secondary site as part of our DR solution,” said Oatway.

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.

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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