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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

The University of New Hampshire Relies on ExaGrid to Maintain Backup Storage Grades

Customer Overview

The University of New Hampshire is a public research university, providing comprehensive, high-quality programs of distinction to over 15,000 students annually. Its primary purpose is learning – students collaborating with faculty in teaching, research, creative expression and service. UNH has a national and international agenda and serves the state through continuing education, cooperative extension, cultural outreach, economic development activities and applied research.

Key Benefits:

  • Seamless integration with Veeam and Veritas NetBackup
  • Data deduplication ratio is 2X that of past solution
  • 25% time savings in administering backup
  • Assigned customer support engineer provides ‘rare’ level of service
  • System easily expands to accommodate growing UNH data
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Backup Capacity Drives Decision to Select ExaGrid

In 2012, UNH’s main goal was to boost the backup capacity in their increasingly complex environment. The university used VTL tape backups, and the time and cost required to manage backups was reaching a tipping point. UNH needed an affordable, well-rounded solution for their main backup to complement their virtualization efforts. UNH decided on ExaGrid to do the job. Currently UNH has a two-site ExaGrid solution, supporting both Veeam and Veritas NetBackup.

“As our primary backup repository, ExaGrid continues to be simple and easy to manage after all these years. The ExaGrid system allows me to pay attention to other things, and the fact that it’s quiet is very important to me in my role,” stated Robert Rader, storage and backup administrator at the University of New Hampshire. Retention is fairly static as the university keeps incrementals of all production data for two weeks, full backups of all data for six weeks, and monthly archives of financial and business critical data for one year.

"As our primary backup repository, ExaGrid continues to be simple and easy to manage after all these years. The ExaGrid system allows me to pay attention to other things, and the fact that it’s quiet is very important to me in my role. "

Robert Rader, Storage and Backup Administrator

ExaGrid Supports Data Growth Easily

“Data growth was the main driver for switching to ExaGrid. Our previous solution limited us in terms of expanding capacity to accommodate data growth. We needed something that was more expandable and flexible,” said Rader.

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). “We’re getting twice the deduplication ratios of our old solution. On average, we’re getting about 10:1,” said Rader.

Assigned Support Engineer Makes All the Difference

“One thing about ExaGrid that stands out compared to similar vendors is having an assigned support specialist. It’s nice to know somebody by name and have a specific person to email with a question. It’s very rare to find this level of service today,” said Rader.

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.

“Installation went smoothly and upgrades are so much easier than our old solution. ExaGrid is much easier to maintain on a weekly, monthly, and long-term basis. It takes far less time to administer it – perhaps 25% less, if not more! It’s the set-and-forget aspect that I enjoy most,” said Rader.

Scale-out Architecture Provides Superior Scalability

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.

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.

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 6PB full backup in a single system.

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