GastroSocial Gains Reliable Backup and Quick Restores After Switch to ExaGrid
Customer Overview
GastroSocial is comprised of both a compensation fund and a pension fund for the hotel and catering industry throughout Switzerland, to which it offers customized social insurance solutions. With their head office in Aarau, they are the largest compensation and pension fund association in the country.
Key Benefits:
- Data restored quickly after outage
- ExaGrid offers seamless integration with Veeam
- IT team more confident in backups due to ExaGrid’s reliability
- Restores are 3-4X faster than previous solution
- Knowledgeable support for both ExaGrid and Veeam
Switch to ExaGrid after POC Reveals Improved Performance
Tom Tezak and Andreas Bütler, System Administrators at GastroSocial, had been using an inline deduplication appliance behind Veeam, and decided to look into a new backup solution as they had struggled with backups on a weekly basis.
“The problem with using our previous backup storage solution was that it writes directly to the deduplicated storage, so the performance was poor. In addition, we suffered issues with too many connections when the backup chain was too long and almost deleted the backup chain multiple times when starting a new one,” said Bütler.
“We had a lot of trouble with our previous backup storage; it was simply not sufficient for us. We began to look around for an alternative. The only good part of our solution was Veeam, which we decided to keep,” said Tezak. “We researched storage appliances that had integration with Veeam, and the ExaGrid architecture resonated with us because we had problems with writing backups and deduplicated storage. We were interested in the concept of ExaGrid’s Landing Zone, so we decided to try it,” he said.
“The POC went very well, we noticed better performance right away,” said Bütler. We were thankful for this opportunity because backup appliances are an investment. Our ExaGrid systems engineer did the POC with us and he was very helpful because he has expertise in both Veeam and ExaGrid.”
The ExaGrid system is easy to install and use and works seamlessly with the industry’s leading backup applications so that an organization can retain its investment in its existing backup applications and processes.
"“We experienced a major outage at one point when there was a short circuit in one of our UPS devices, and we lost our SSD shelf in our storage. It was a horrible night! We had our most critical systems back online in a few hours thanks to the great restore speeds with ExaGrid.” "
Critical Systems Restored Quickly After Outage
Bütler and Tezak back up GastroSocial’s data regularly to ensure it is always available, with daily, weekly and monthly backups. In addition, they back up business-critical databases and transaction logs on an hourly basis.
“The best part of the performance is that the backups are not being written to deduplicated storage, but to a Landing Zone, which is great for backup and restore performance,” said Bütler. “Restores from ExaGrid’s Landing Zone are 3-4x faster than with our previous solution.”
ExaGrid’s industry-leading restore performance proved helpful when an unexpected incident occurred with one of the Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) devices. “We experienced a major outage at one point when there was a short circuit in one of our UPS devices, and we lost our SSD shelf in our storage. It was a horrible night!” said Tezak. “Thankfully, we were able to restore our production and all the business-critical systems with Veeam and ExaGrid. We had our most critical systems back online in a few hours thanks to the great restore speeds with ExaGrid.”
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).
Retention Time-Lock (RTL) Meets Security Goals
GastroSocial implemented ExaGrid’s Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery (RTL) feature right from the start to ensure its data would be recoverable in the event of a malicious attack, which was a security goal for their IT team.
“I find it great that there is another security mechanism in place with RTL. This addressed a problem that worried our management. Now, our backups are in a better place than they have ever been,” said Tezak.
ExaGrid appliances have a network-facing disk-cache Landing Zone where the most recent backups are stored in an undeduplicated format for fast backup and restore performance. Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing tier called the Repository Tier, for longer-term retention. ExaGrid’s unique architecture and features provide comprehensive security including RTL, and through the combination of a non-network-facing tier (tiered air gap), a delayed delete policy, and immutable data objects, backup data is protected from being deleted or encrypted. ExaGrid’s offline tier is ready for recovery in the event of an attack.
Proactive ExaGrid Support Stays One Step Ahead
“ExaGrid’s support is one of the major plus points we see with working with ExaGrid. Having one contact person responsible for our support is truly unique and we like that very much. Our support engineer understands our goals and team. He even proactively informs us when there is a larger update and performs it for us without issue. He understands our environment and stays one step ahead.”
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.
ExaGrid Key to Reliable Backups
“It feels really good to know that we have reliable backups. In the past, when I had to delete whole backup chains, it left a bad feeling that we really couldn’t depend on our backups. This has completely changed with ExaGrid,” said Tezak.
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.