ExaGrid-Veeam Simplifies Backup Environment at All In Credit Union
Customer Overview
All In Credit Union was founded as the Army Aviation Center Federal Credit Union in 1966 by seven soldiers at Fort Rucker, Alabama on the principles of the “Credit Union Movement.” In 2019, the credit union changed its name as a tribute to the commitment and sacrifice made by every soldier who defends the United States and knows what it means to be “All In.” Today, All In Credit Union serves more than 115,000 members with 25 branches located in Mobile and Southeast Alabama, as well as the Florida Panhandle.
Key Benefits:
- All In Credit Union virtualizes backup environment, switches to ExaGrid and Veeam
- ExaGrid-Veeam backs up credit union’s data in minutes
- Managing backups a ‘seamless process’ thanks to ExaGrid’s UI
- Proactive ExaGrid Support ‘a valuable asset’ that helps keep system running efficiently
Virtualizing Backup Environment with ExaGrid-Veeam Solution
All In Credit Union had been backing up its data to a tape library using Veritas Backup Exec. As the credit union’s infrastructure virtualized, its IT team looked into other backup solutions for its new VMware. “We were looking at Veeam for our backups, and decided to move away from tape libraries because they were clunky and no longer fit in the direction we were moving our environment,” said Aaron Wade, system administrator II at All In. “During our research, we found that ExaGrid integrates well with Veeam, and that integration is what won us over,” he added. The combination of ExaGrid and Veeam’s industry leading virtual server data protection solutions allows customers to utilize Veeam Backup & Replication in VMware, vSphere, and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual environments on ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage. This combination provides fast backups and efficient data storage as well as replication to an offsite location for disaster recovery. Customers can use Veeam Backup & Replication’s built-in source-side deduplication in concert with ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage with Adaptive Deduplication to further shrink backups.
"There’s just no comparison with our previous solution as far as creating a backup job and then even having to restore from it. Everything we do with our ExaGrid-Veeam solution is such a smooth process. "
Backups and Restores a ‘Smooth Process’ with ExaGrid and Veeam
Wade backs up the credit union’s virtual environment, as well as its Oracle databases, to its ExaGrid system, using Veeam. “Our critical servers are backed up in nightly incrementals and we’ve set up a backup copy of those jobs that we keep weekly, monthly, yearly copies of. We also have a weekly full backup of that we keep for 30 days. The data is backed up so quickly! Most of our incremental backups take a few minutes and our full backups take eight minutes,” Wade said.
“There’s just no comparison with our previous solution as far as creating a backup job and then even having to restore from it. Everything we do with our ExaGrid-Veeam solution is such a smooth process,” he added. “Managing our backups is a fairly seamless process because ExaGrid provides such a user-friendly system. When I log into the web interface, all the information is at my fingertips, and I can easily see where my storage levels are at,” said Wade. “One of the best things about using our ExaGrid system is knowing that our data is readily available.”
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.
ExaGrid Support: ‘A Valuable Asset’
Wade has found his assigned ExaGrid support engineer to be very helpful with keeping his ExaGrid system up-to-date and working through any issues that arise. “Recently, two disk drives needed to be replaced at our DR site, and before we even realized the issue, our ExaGrid support engineer let us know new drives were being overnighted to replace them. He also checked to make sure our backups would continue seamlessly until we got the new drives, and explained how to log in and mark the drives on our system so that we would know which ones to replace at our physical location. His knowledge and support, and
ExaGrid’s interface, made replacement a painless process.
“Having an assigned ExaGrid support engineer is a valuable asset. He’s professional, resourceful, knowledgeable, and he makes working with the ExaGrid and Veeam products very easy. He’s always proactive when we do any updates and makes sure that I know where we are in the process. At one point, he even logged into my system and helped me look at the Veeam path, so that we could clean up the storage before we did a major upgrade. It was so helpful to make sure we didn’t have old jobs sitting on the system that we didn’t need anymore. It was really twofold; we upgraded our solution, and then we were able to clean up the storage as well. I’ve appreciated working with him over the years, and would recommend ExaGrid’s support to anyone,” said Wade.
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.
ExaGrid’s Unique Architecture Provides Investment Protection
ExaGrid’s award-winning scale-out architecture provides customers with a consistent backup window regardless of data growth. Its unique disk-cache Landing Zone retains the most recent backup in its full undeduplicated form, enabling the fastest restores, offsite tape copies, and instant recoveries.
ExaGrid’s multiple appliance models can be combined into a single system configuration, allowing full backups of up to 2.7PB with a combined ingest rate of 488TB/hr. The appliances virtualize into one another when plugged into a switch so that multiple appliance models can be mixed and matched into a single configuration. Each appliance includes the appropriate amount of processor, memory, disk, and bandwidth for the data size, so as each appliance is virtualized into the system, performance is maintained and backup times do not increase as data is added. Once virtualized, they appear as a single pool of long-term capacity. Capacity load balancing of all data across servers is automatic, and multiple systems can be combined for additional capacity. Even though data is load balanced, deduplication occurs across the systems so that data migration does not cause a loss of effectiveness in deduplication. 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.