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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Mazars USA Counts on ExaGrid for Faster, More Efficient Backups

Customer Overview

Mazars is an internationally integrated partnership, specializing in audit, accountancy, advisory, tax, and legal services. Operating in over 95 countries and territories around the world, they draw on the expertise of more than 47,000 professionals – 30,000+ in Mazars’ integrated partnership and 17,000+ via the Mazars North America Alliance – to assist clients of all sizes at every stage in their development.

Key Benefits:

  • Data deduplication reduces amount of storage
  • Backup window reduces from 14 hours to 2
  • Seamless integration with Veritas Backup Exec
  • Strong ROI
  • Installing the ExaGrid system was simple and straightforward
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IT Team Struggles with Tape, Turns to Cost-Effective ExaGrid System

Like most other organizations, Mazars’ data volumes are continuously increasing. The public accounting firm is federally mandated to keep data for as long as seven years but was having difficulty meeting retention goals with tape.

“We were constantly purchasing larger and larger tape drives, and were in a never-ending cycle of purchasing tape to feed our backup demands,” said Egan Richards, assistant director of information technology at Mazars USA. “We decided to search for a new, more efficient backup solution with data deduplication to reduce the amount of data we store.”

"One of the things we like about the ExaGrid system is its scalability. We have some mergers on the horizon, so we don’t have a firm grasp on our long-range data growth. The fact that we can easily expand the system made us much more comfortable about the purchase. "

Egan Richards, Assistant Director of IT

Multi-Site ExaGrid System Delivers Strong Data Deduplication to Reduce Amount of Data Stored

Richards said that the firm’s IT staff looked at several different backup products in addition to ExaGrid,
including solutions from Dell EMC Data Domain. After evaluating the systems, Mazars decided to purchase a multi-site ExaGrid and installed units in its New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania offices. The firm uses Veritas Backup Exec as its backup application to back up data from both physical and virtual servers. Data from the systems is cross replicated for disaster recovery purposes.

“The ExaGrid system was more cost-effective than the Dell EMC Data Domain unit, and we liked its data deduplication capabilities. Data deduplication was important to us from a space saving and time-saving perspective; it helps us to easily meet our retention goals in as little disk space as possible,” said Richards. “One of our concerns with tape was the length of our backup times – they were way too long. ExaGrid’s data deduplication ensures that our backups run as quickly as possible because it’s performed after the backup hits the landing zone.”

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).

Faster Backups, Reduced Administration

Prior to installing the ExaGrid system, Mazars’ backups were running as long as 14 hours per night in its New York City office. Now, that same backup job runs just a couple of hours. In other satellite offices, backups that were running for four hours have been reduced to just an hour. “Our backup jobs are faster and run more consistently and reliably than they did with tape, Richards said. “It also takes far less staff time to manage the system. Other than just checking to make sure things are running smoothly, there’s not much to do on a daily basis. The reduced administration time, coupled with the fact that we’ve been able to eliminate tape and tape drive purchases from our budget, makes for a fantastic ROI.”

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.

“The ExaGrid system is easy to use, and it really takes user error out of the equation, especially compared to tape. With tape, there were times when the person responsible for backup would forget to change the tape or the vault would go bad. We were also constantly servicing the units,” he said. “Those factors are no longer in the equation because there are no more vaults being used, and there’s virtually no user intervention required. Our backups run smoothly and successfully each and every night.”

Installing the ExaGrid system was simple and straightforward, Richards said. “Setting up the ExaGrid system was a breeze. We followed some simple instructions, and then our ExaGrid support engineer took over and did most of the configuration work for us,” he said. “Our support engineer is fantastic. He’s easy to get in touch with by phone or email, and he’s very knowledgeable about the product. We’ve been very happy with support.”

Scale-out Architecture Ensures Scalability

“One of the things we like about the ExaGrid system is its scalability. We have some mergers on the horizon, so we don’t have a firm grasp on our long-range data growth. The fact that we can easily expand the system made us much more comfortable about the purchase,” Richards said.

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.

“Having a solid backup solution in place has taken a load off my mind. I don’t have to worry about day-to day file recoveries, disaster recovery, tape rotation, or lost or corrupt tapes,” said Richards. “We also have plenty of room on the system for retention, and we can easily expand it to meet future requirements without a forklift upgrade.”

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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