Disk-Based Backup Storage Supports Retention Requirements and Data Growth

When Zeidan Ata, Infrastructure Manager at Eisai, first joined the company, they had two sites, one on each side of the highway. A few years later, Eisai consolidated everything into one location. Each site used to have its own backup master server and its own policies on each. When the company consolidated, they kept two different backup servers and two different tape libraries in addition to backing up to tape.

“Because of the nature of our work, the FDA requires us to maintain some of our backups for 30 years, so tape is still a part of our plan on a quarterly basis only. Our yearly data grows up to 25% each year, so the decision to go with ExaGrid really made sense. Our day- to-day retention is 90 days, and we back up around 115TBs weekly,” said Ata.

Eisai’s equipment was getting old, and Ata’s team started seeing a lot of errors, which ultimately resulted in a lot of wasted time managing backups. “We realized that we needed to upgrade our systems and look for a new solution. We went straight to Gartner’s magic quadrant and had Dell EMC, ExaGrid, Veritas, and HP present their solutions. We had to narrow it down to three products and to be honest, I was very impressed with ExaGrid compared to everybody else. Plus, the price was very competitive.

“In the end, it was really a decision between ExaGrid and Dell EMC. Because of ExaGrid’s deduplication and architecture with every ExaGrid appliance having compute as well as storage, we decided to go with ExaGrid,” said Ata. “The landing zone was the most attractive feature.”

Speed of Backup Surprised IT Manager and Grants More Time

“When I started seeing the backups happening, I began to worry that maybe we didn’t size it correctly, but then after all the backups completed and I looked at the ExaGrid dashboard, I saw a lot of green for availability and I got worried and thought we had a problem until I realized it was done! Backups are fast, but recovery is even faster,” said Ata.

“We had a volume that’s about 30TB; the original backup took almost a week to complete, and it took two months to complete on tape. It’s a new backup world now.”

“We easily save more than 50% of our time managing backups. Every time we had a Monday or a Friday holiday, I worried about getting tapes swapped prior; not to run out of media to write to before we can rotate tapes again. That was really a big pain point for us, and we had to be on top of it continuously because all the data that we back up is crucial for the individuals who generate it. Now that we have ExaGrid implemented, it’s so nice to see how well it works and how much less I have to worry about backups on a daily basis.”

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.