Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ACNB Bank Installs ExaGrid System, Runs “Flawlessly”

Customer Overview

ACNB Bank is a wholly-owned subsidiary of ACNB Corporation, an independent financial holding company headquartered in Gettysburg, PA. Originally founded in 1857, ACNB Bank serves its marketplace with banking and wealth management services, including trust and retail brokerage, via a network of 20 community banking offices, located in the four southcentral Pennsylvania counties of Adams, Cumberland, Franklin and York, as well as loan offices in Lancaster and York, PA, and Hunt Valley, MD.

Key Benefits

  • Integration with Backup Exec minimized learning curve
  • Retention goals exceeded
  • Replication completed overnight; workday network speed not affected
  • 15% less time spent managing backups
  • 20% reduction in backup window
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Replication Challenges Led to ‘Highly Recommended’ ExaGrid Solution

ACNB Bank had been successfully backing up to disk on a nightly basis; however, replication to its disaster recovery site proved challenging. After multiple attempts to resolve the situation, the bank’s IT staff decided to look for a new solution. “We tried several different methods to get the replication to work without increasing the bandwidth between sites but could never get it to operate correctly. We were falling further and further behind, and finally got to the point where we just had to stop and look at other options,” said Stanley Miller, Data Center Administrator for ACNB Bank.

Miller said that the bank’s IT staff started networking with local businesses and other business contacts and discovered ExaGrid. “We heard about the ExaGrid solution from other users, and it came highly recommended. From a technology standpoint, we liked that it could deliver strong data deduplication and required a minimum amount of bandwidth between sites,” he said.

ACNB Bank purchased an ExaGrid EX13000 appliance for its main datacenter and an EX7000 for its disaster recovery site. Both systems work along with Veritas Backup Exec, the bank’s existing backup application, to back up both physical and virtual machines. “Strong integration with Backup Exec was a requirement, and the ExaGrid system works flawlessly with it. The tight integration minimized our learning curve and saved money because we were able to keep our existing solution,” said Miller.

"Our data growth has been fairly constant, but in our industry, you have to plan for the unforeseen. We’re confident that the ExaGrid system will be able to expand to handle anything in the future. "

Stanley Miller, Data Center Administrator

Data Deduplication Helps Double Retention, Speed Replication

Since installing the ExaGrid system, ACNB Bank has been seeing data deduplication ratios as high as 8:1, and retention has more than doubled. “Thanks to ExaGrid’s strong data deduplication, we’re actually above our data retention goals,” said Miller. “Also, because only changed data is sent between sites, replication is completed quickly. In fact, we had expected that the replication process would spill over into the workday, but we’re able to complete everything overnight so it doesn’t affect our network at all.”

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 so that an RTO and RPO can be easily met. Available system cycles are utilized to perform deduplication and offsite replication for an optimal recovery point at the disaster recovery site. Once complete, the onsite data is protected and immediately available in its full undeduplicated form for fast restores, VM Instant Recoveries, and tape copies while the offsite data is ready for disaster recovery.

Intuitive Management and Administration Saves Time

Miller estimates that he spends approximately 15 percent less time managing backups than he did before, and backup times have been reduced by approximately 20 percent. The ExaGrid system was designed to be easy to set up and maintain, and ExaGrid’s industry-leading customer support team is staffed by trained, in-house level 2 engineers who are assigned to individual accounts. The system is fully supported, and was designed and manufactured for maximum uptime with redundant, hot-swappable components.

“The ExaGrid system is incredibly easy to use, and we don’t really have to manage it or even think about our backups anymore. Before, we were constantly working on the replication issues, but now our backups are quickly completed each night, and we don’t have to worry about getting our data offsite,” he said

Unique Architecture Provides Scalability to Grow

Although the ExaGrid system was sized to handle the bank’s expected data growth for the next three to five years, Miller said that its scale-out architecture will enable the system to easily expand in the event that the bank has a sudden surge of data due to unforeseen circumstances like an acquisition.

“Our data growth has been fairly constant, but in our industry, you have to plan for the unforeseen. We’re confident that the ExaGrid system will be able to expand to handle anything in the future,” he said.

The ExaGrid system can easily scale to accommodate data growth. ExaGrid’s computing software makes the system highly scalable, and when plugged into a switch, appliances of any size or age can be mixed and matched in a single system with capacities of up to a 2.7PB full backup plus retention and an ingest rate of up to 488TB per hour. Once virtualized, they appear as a single system to the backup server, and load balancing of all data across servers is automatic.

“ExaGrid’s data deduplication and replication capabilities have been nothing short of amazing. We have all this data that we weren’t able to replicate before, but now, we can get it all backed up and replicated offsite in a much smaller window – and with fewer headaches.”

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’s 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 the 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).