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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Arc Wayne Achieves Simplicity, Flexibility, and Reliability with ExaGrid Disk-Based Backup

Customer Overview

The Arc Wayne advocates for and serves persons of all ages with or without special needs. The Agency assists individuals in taking their full, independent, productive place in society through an array of quality individualized services.

Key Benefits:

  • Dedupe ratios as high as 26:1
  • Seamless integration with Veritas Backup Exec
  • Frees up IT time to tend to other projects
  • Expert support
  • Reliability gives confidence that it ‘just works’ every day
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Tape Backups Were Wasting Time, Space and Labor

Arc Wayne’s existing backup systems were becoming unsustainable due to their reliance on tape. The wasted time and headaches of storing, managing, and finding tapes were becoming a real challenge. Stephen Burke, IT Coordinator at Wayne ARC said, “We had a disjointed hodgepodge of multiple tapes in multiple servers in a large room that consumed a lot of space. Taking care of all those tapes involved ejecting 14 different tapes and checking to see if they worked right every day.”

The IT staff couldn’t be sure if they were meeting their retention policy due to the tape sprawl. Simply defining a retention policy was a difficult task. According to Burke, “Defining retention was an issue when we had so many disassociated systems. It was hard to keep track of it.”

Arc Wayne realized that their backups were broken and that they needed to come up with a more streamlined system that could fix their tape headaches and safeguard their data. According to Burke, “That was a goal of ours, to consolidate and reduce the amount of overhead required to perform most of the tasks.”

"I used to have employees who were stuck managing services and backups every day. Now I have them back on more useful projects. It also means that I have the security of knowing that I have all the data I need if something was to happen here. "

Stephen Burke, IT Coordinator

Homegrown Alternatives to Tape Were Rejected

ARC Wayne IT considered, and then rejected, the idea of scaling the existing backup systems to accommodate new data growth. Burke said, “Certainly we weren’t utilizing all the space on each tape. You could take up more space on each tape, but there’s no way that anybody would want to do such a thing.”

“We looked at deploying a large tape array to start with, which was more a natural process than inventing our own disk-to-disk homegrown type of system,” he added. After considering and rejecting both of those options, Arc Wayne turned to an ExaGrid partner who sized and recommended a replacement system, supplied the solution and were on site for the implementation.

ExaGrid Selected to Relieve the Cost and Headaches of Tape

In researching backup solutions, the team singled out ExaGrid as the one solution that could ease their tape headaches and lower the IT burden of managing backups and restores. According to Burke, “ExaGrid came on the table as one of the more flexible, quickly deployable solutions. I was buying into an all-in-one package that offered the solution tied into the same infrastructure which was already in place. I didn’t have to invent anything that wasn’t already there. “

Arc Wayne purchased one ExaGrid appliance for their main data center. Seeing the advantages, they plan to expand to a second system to expedite their offsite backup processes as well. They had been using an earlier version of Veritas Backup Exec, but had reached the point where it was time to update to the latest release. Burke said,

“We were in a unique situation where we were able to reinvent everything and taking a look at all the problem areas we had, it wasn’t hard.”

ExaGrid Delivers Increased Throughput, Reduced IT Workload and Reliable Backups

The ExaGrid system quickly became a part of the daily operations and environment at Arc Wayne. “We back up everything we do to the ExaGrid system, which includes all voice communication, all of our systems that control email, our internal intranet sites, and all of our system applications that we rely on every day.”

Arc Wayne has experienced a large increase in throughput due to removing the limitations of a tape backup system. ExaGrid delivers unparalleled cost savings and performance using post-process deduplication that allows the backups to write directly to disk at disk speeds. This unique approach results in a steep drop in disk storage requirements and produces a faster backup with a shorter backup window. Burke reports that Wayne ARC currently achieves deduplication ratios up to 36:1.

The ExaGrid system has also reduced the labor and overhead associated with tape backups. IT staff can now focus their time on performing core activities that were previously wasted managing backups to tape. Burke says, “I used to have employees who were stuck managing services and backups every day. Now I have them back on more useful projects. It also means that I have the security of knowing that I have all the data I need if something was to happen here.”

ExaGrid Offers Simplicity, Flexibility and Reliability

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. According to Burke, the ExaGrid system can be summed up in three simple terms. He says, “It’s a modular system that works. Simplicity – It’s meant to work with other systems, not isolated from software packages that the real world uses. Flexibility – I’m not tied to a specific tape size that reduces and constrains where I can go with it. Reliability – It just works every day, and if it thinks it has a problem, it lets you know so you can react appropriately.”

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 Backup Exec

Veritas Backup Exec provides cost-effective, high-performance backup and recovery – including continuous data protection for Microsoft Exchange servers, Microsoft SQL servers, file servers, and workstations. High-performance agents and options provide fast, flexible, granular protection and scalable management of local and remote server backups.

Organizations using Veritas Backup Exec can look to ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage for nightly backups. ExaGrid sits behind existing backup applications, such as Veritas Backup Exec, providing faster and more reliable backups and restores. In a network running Veritas Backup Exec, using ExaGrid is as easy as pointing existing backup jobs at a NAS share on the ExaGrid system. Backup jobs are sent directly from the backup application to ExaGrid for backup to disk.

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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