ExaGrid Boosts Performance of BearingPoint’s Commvault and Linux Backups
Customer Overview
BearingPoint is an independent management and technology consultancy with European roots and a global reach. The company operates in three business units: Consulting, Products, and Capital. Consulting covers the advisory business with a clear focus on selected business areas. Products provides IP-driven digital assets and managed services for business-critical processes. Capital delivers M&A and transaction services.
BearingPoint’s clients include many of the world’s leading companies and organizations. The firm has a global consulting network with more than 13,000 people and supports clients in over 70 countries, engaging with them to achieve measurable and sustainable success
Key Benefits:
- ExaGrid supports multiple backup apps in BearingPoint’s IT environment
- ExaGrid provides deduplication ratios as high as 74:1, saving on storage capacity
- Backup management is a ‘much smoother experience’ since switching to ExaGrid
ExaGrid Supports both Commvault and Linux Backups
The IT staff at BearingPoint had been backing up its data to LTO-4 tape drives using IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) but were frustrated with how complicated the solution was to manage and how long it took to back up and restore data. BearingPoint decided to switch to Commvault as its new backup application as well as Bareos for its Linux data, and decided to look for a new storage solution. “We decided on ExaGrid because it provides deduplication for both types of our backups which makes storing our backups very cost-effective,” said Daniel Weidacher, senior system analyst at BearingPoint.
ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage requires close integration between the backup software and the backup storage. Together, Commvault and ExaGrid provide a cost- effective backup solution that scales to meet the needs of demanding enterprise environments. ExaGrid improves the storage economics of Commvault environments by working with Commvault deduplication on to provide up to 20:1 reduction in storage consumption – a 3X storage savings over using Commvault deduplication alone. This combination dramatically lowers the cost of onsite and offsite backup storage.
"ExaGrid backs up the data so much faster; some of our backups are finished in under a minute and our largest backup jobs are finished within five hours. "
Backups and Restores are ‘So Quick’
BearingPoint installed an ExaGrid system at its primary site that replicates data to another ExaGrid system installed at its disaster recovery (DR) site. Weidacher performs daily backups in addition to regular snapshots. “We have a mix of physical and virtual servers to back up,” he said. “We’re backing up about 300TB of data, everything from VM images, production server source files, and source code file servers.”
Weidacher has been impressed with the speed of the daily backup jobs. “Our backups are so quick now, it’s hard to even compare them to the backups we had to the tape library. ExaGrid backs up the data so much faster; some of our backups are finished in under a minute and our largest backup jobs are finished within five hours.” Switching to an ExaGrid system has resolved the issue with slow restoration of data that Weidacher had experienced with the tape library it had used in the past. “It’s very convenient to restore single files using ExaGrid and the restore times are very fast,” he said.
“Our deduplication ratios with ExaGrid are quite high, between 6:1 to 74:1, depending on the type of data,” he added. ExaGrid customers can simply transfer file system data from Unix or Linux systems to the ExaGrid server. ExaGrid delivers a 10:1 to 50:1 deduplication ratio and can replicate the deduplicated data to an offsite disaster recovery location as well as report deduplication ratios by the individual Unix/Linux backup jobs.
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 Simplifies Backup Management
Weidacher appreciates how much simpler backup management has become since switching to ExaGrid. “Now that we no longer have to do tape library maintenance tasks, backup management is a much smoother experience. ExaGrid support is great, and takes care of firmware updates for the system,” he said. 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.
Unique Architecture Provides Lifetime Investment
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.