ExaGrid Helps ASGCO Alleviate Backup Pain
Customer Overview
ASGCO® “Complete Conveyor Solutions” is a leading manufacturer of proprietary bulk conveyor components and accessories that enhance material flow performance. Founded in 1971 by Alfred S. Gibbs and his son Todd Gibbs, ASGCO® believes in taking care of the customer with great quality products and exceptional service. ASGCO® is a diversified and innovative company with three major divisions that serve specific targets of the material handling industry. We market these innovative products and services through selected distributors, joint ventures, and representatives worldwide. The company is located in Nazareth, Pennsylvania.
Key Benefits:
- ExaGrid system takes up a smaller footprint
- Installation was painless and management is a breeze
- Spends virtually no time managing backups
- Scalable architecture fits nicely into the company’s future IT infrastructure planning
ExaGrid System Purchased to Address Problematic, Inconsistent Backups
ASGCO had been backing up its data to tape, but constant issues with the company’s tape drive and backup server meant that backups weren’t always completed properly. In addition, the company’s IT staff spent hours each week troubleshooting, juggling backup jobs, and managing tape.
“Dealing with our backup environment was a never-ending battle. We’d get the system working for a period of time, and then it would begin failing again, so our backup jobs weren’t getting completed correctly. We were missing backup windows and were constantly juggling jobs to try and get everything backed up,” said Daniel Keuler, IT manager at ASGCO. “We began looking for a solution that would improve the stability and consistency of our backups and decided to purchase the ExaGrid system.”
At ASGCO, ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage system with Adaptive Deduplication works along with the company’s existing backup application, Veritas Backup Exec, to back up and protect a wide range of corporate data, including Exchange server data and general business files from both physical and virtual machines. “Tight integration with Backup Exec was important to us because we didn’t want to change backup applications. The ExaGrid system works extremely well with Backup Exec, which helped with our learning curve,” said Keuler
Adaptive Deduplication Maximizes Disk Space
ExaGrid’s Adaptive Deduplication technology automatically reduces the amount of data ASGCO stores so that the company can keep as much retention as possible. “Retention was a serious issue with our old backup infrastructure because we could only keep four weeks of data at a time. Now, with the ExaGrid, we’re able to keep 16 weeks’ retention. ExaGrid’s data deduplication technology is very effective at reducing our data, so it takes up a smaller footprint,” Keuler said.
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.
"Retention was a serious issue with our old backup infrastructure because we could only keep four weeks of data at a time. Now, with the ExaGrid, we’re able to keep 16 weeks’ retention. ExaGrid’s adaptive deduplication technology is very effective at reducing our data, so it takes up a smaller footprint. "
Easy Setup and Management
Keuler said that he installed the ExaGrid system over a year ago and hasn’t had to touch it since. “Installing the ExaGrid system was painless. We just called up ExaGrid when we racked the machine, and our support engineer walked us through the installation process. It was up and running in no time, and we haven’t had to touch it in over a year,” he said. “We spend virtually no time at all managing backups now.”
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 fact that we have a dedicated customer support engineer is wonderful. He’s familiar with us and our environment and is always available to answer our questions,” Keuler said.
Scale-out Architecture Ensures Scalability
“One of the strongest points about the ExaGrid system is its scale-out architecture. It’s reassuring to know that we can easily scale the system at some point in the future by simply adding another device,” 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.
“The ExaGrid system is an extremely reliable system. Our backup jobs are completed every night without fail, and I’ve been able to significantly reduce the amount of time I spend managing and troubleshooting backup jobs. Installing the ExaGrid has made my life much easier,” said Keuler.
ExaGrid and Veritas Backup Exec
Veritas Backup Exec provides cost-effective, high-performance, and certified disk-to-disk-to-tape 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 as an alternative to tape 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 in place of a tape backup system 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 SATA/SAS drives with zone-level data deduplication, delivering a disk-based solution that is far more cost effective than simply backing up to straight disk. ExaGrid’s patented zone-level deduplication reduces the disk space needed by a range of 10:1 to 50:1 by storing only the unique bytes across backups instead of redundant data. Adaptive Deduplication performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups while providing full system resources to the backups for the fastest backups and, therefore, the shortest backup window. As data grows, only ExaGrid avoids expanding backup windows by adding full appliances in a system. ExaGrid’s unique Landing Zone keeps a full copy of the most recent backup on disk, delivering the fastest restores, VM boots in seconds to minutes, “Instant DR,” and fast tape copy. Over time, ExaGrid saves up to 50% in total system costs compared to competitive solutions by avoiding costly “forklift” upgrades.