National Home Builder Simplifies Backups and Restores With ExaGrid Disk Backup With Deduplication
Customer Overview
Based in Houston, Texas, David Weekley Homes is one of the largest privately held home builders in America, operating in 19 markets across the nation.
Key Benefits:
- Seamless integration with Veritas Backup Exec
- Top-notch customer support
- Fast restores
- Reduced backup times by 75%
Economic Downturn Forces Company to Re-evaluate Data Protection Strategy
In a tough economic climate, many companies are facing budget and personnel cuts and being asked to do more with less. One of the most affected has been the housing market. David Weekley Homes, like many of its counterparts in the industry, had to make significant staff cuts that included the IT organization.
At the same time, the company was managing its data protection with a fully managed hosting provider which consumed a significant portion of its IT budget. Eventually, the company switched from a fully hosted provider to a co-location facility.
“With the slowdown in the housing market, we were paying too much for a hosted solution, so it made sense to t move from a fully managed to a colocation facility and manage it ourselves,” said Peter Mier, systems engineer.
"We’ve been extremely impressed with the ExaGrid system and how it works seamlessly with Veritas Backup Exec. The ability for us to keep our investment in our existing infrastructure has been huge. It’s simplified our backups and given us the reliability that we needed. "
Selection of ExaGrid Disk Backup with Deduplication Helps Solidify Backups and Restores
According to Mier, not only was it costly to have its backups managed in this way, but the backups themselves were problematic. Using tape as its backup media, the company experienced long backup windows and unreliable backups.
“We were only getting a full backup of certain systems every three to four days at best. We weren’t getting daily incrementals or weekly fulls of our critical data,” said Mier. “Our hosting provider was also unable to figure out how to backup our Exchange environment, so we had to actually come up with the alternative solution to back up across the WAN to our headquarters while they
tried to figure it out.”
Mier said the company was not comfortable with not having its critical systems fully backed up daily so the organization decided to look for something faster and more dependable that would replicate and back up to disk but replicate to another site as well. The company evaluated several systems including solutions from Dell EMC and HP… eventually selecting ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage Solution.
“We wanted something that was quick to disk and affordable. The other solution providers wanted us to build a SAN infrastructure and use all these different types of software to use their deduplication and replication technology and this was not what we were looking for. We selected ExaGrid because it was really the only solution that gave us what we needed at a reasonable cost.”
Works with Existing Backup Application to Provide Smoother, More Reliable Backups
The ExaGrid works in conjunction with David Weekley’s existing backup application, Veritas Backup Exec. “We’ve been extremely impressed with the ExaGrid system and how it works seamlessly with Backup Exec,” said Mier. “The ability for us to keep our investment in our existing infrastructure has been huge. It’s simplified our backups and given us the reliability that we needed.”
David Weekley Homes now runs incremental backups nightly and full backups each weekend of its critical data. With ExaGrid, the company has cut its backup times by about 75%.
Data Deduplication Reduces Data, Speeds Restores
“ExaGrid’s data deduplication technology has helped to greatly reduce our data and speed up our restores,” said Mier. “Because we have so much additional space on the server, we’re considering moving over some of our other non-critical jobs.”
ExaGrid combines last backup compression along with data deduplication, which stores changes from backup to backup instead of storing full file copies. This unique approach has reduced David Weekley Homes’ disk space required by a range of 10:1 to 24:1.
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).
Scalability for Growing Data Requirements
The ExaGrid system can easily scale to accommodate data growth. ExaGrid’s software makes the system highly scalable – appliances of any size or age can be mixed and matched in a single system. A single scale-out system can take in up to a 2.7PB full backup plus retention at an ingest rate of up to 488TB per hour. ExaGrid appliances contain not just disk but also processing power, memory, and bandwidth. When the system needs to expand, additional appliances are simply added to the existing system. The system scales linearly, maintaining a fixed-length backup window as data grows so customers only pay for what they need, when they need it.
“ExaGrid gives us peace of mind that we have a robust system in place that can easily scale as our organization and data requirements grow,” said Mier. “Soon, we hope to have our satellite offices all leveraging the ExaGrid disk backup system.”
Top-notch Customer Support
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.
“After the initial setup which wasn’t that hard to do, we really have not had to call for much help. We even get notifications if there is error of any sort so our devices are being monitored proactively by the ExaGrid team,” said Mier. “The rare instance that we do need to chat with a person, I find the service to be a little more personal and the rep is always knowledgeable of our environment and gets the issue resolved quickly.”
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.
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).