Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Eby-Brown Gains Faster Backups and Restores with ExaGrid

Customer Overview

Eby-Brown is a leading convenience store supplier, delivering innovative foodservice and merchandising, along with valuable technology and insight to more than 10,000 c-store retailers across North America. Eby-Brown was acquired by Performance Food Group in 2021.

Key Benefits:

  • Best customer support experience of any vendor
  • System is ‘easy to manage,’ has reduced IT staff time spent on backup
  • Backup window reduced from days to hours
  • Replication over WAN provides improved disaster recovery
Download PDF

Long Backups Cause System Slowdowns

Like many organizations, the IT staff at Eby-Brown had been struggling with tape backups for a long time. The company’s databases had grown extremely large and beyond the capacity of its tape library, so weekly full backups often lasted into Monday morning. For users, the long backups meant system slowdowns at the beginning of the work week.

“Our backups were simply taking too long and were affecting our system performance, said JR Morales, IT systems integrator for Eby-Brown. “We were also concerned about our ability to properly protect our information using tape going forward.”

Two-site ExaGrid System Used for Both Primary Backup and Disaster Recovery

With several new IT initiatives on the horizon, the IT staff at Eby-Brown decided to look for a new backup system and chose ExaGrid. The company selected a two-site ExaGrid system, installing one for primary backup in its Naperville datacenter and a second system five hours away in Plainfield, Indiana for disaster recovery. The ExaGrid systems work with Eby-Brown’s existing backup application, Arcserve Backup.

“We chose the ExaGrid system based on the effectiveness of its data deduplication and the fact that we could deploy a second system for disaster recovery,” said Morales. “ExaGrid’s data deduplication does a great job at reducing our data, and transmitting data between sites is extremely fast and requires minimal bandwidth because only the changes are sent between locations.”

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).

"Before we purchased our two-site ExaGrid system, we performed a cost analysis that showed installing two ExaGrid systems would cost less over time than tape. When you consider the cost of tape, transportation, and the amount of time our IT staff had devoted to managing tape and performing restores, purchasing the ExaGrid system was a no-brainer. "

JR Morales, IT Systems Integrator

Scale-out Architecture Ensures Smooth, Easy Scalability

Because Eby-Brown’s data was growing quickly, Morales and his staff needed to ensure that expanding the backup capabilities would be as simple as possible. Since installing the ExaGrid system, Eby-Brown has expanded the system twice to meet increased backup needs.

“Upgrading the ExaGrid system was a pretty simple process,” said Morales. “We experienced some slight issues with the way our Oracle system handled it, but our ExaGrid support engineer worked closely with us on it and resolved the problem quickly. Working with our support engineer has been phenomenal, and it’s probably been one of the best experiences I’ve had with customer support from any vendor.”

The ExaGrid system can easily scale to accommodate data growth. ExaGrid’s software makes the system highly scalable – appliances of any size or age can be mixed and matched in a single system. A single scale-out system can take in up to a 2.7PB full backup plus retention at an ingest rate of up to 488TB per hour. ExaGrid appliances contain not just disk but also processing power, memory, and bandwidth. When the system needs to expand, additional appliances are simply added to the existing system. The system scales linearly, maintaining a fixed-length backup window as data grows so customers only pay for what they need, when they need it.

Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing repository tier with automatic load balancing and global deduplication across all repositories. Since installing the ExaGrid system, Eby-Brown has significantly increased the amount of data it backs up. Prior to installing the ExaGrid system, the IT staff at Eby-Brown began backing up the company’s data at 4:00 p.m. Friday afternoon and ran backup jobs until Monday morning. Since installing the ExaGrid system, Eby-Brown has increased the amount of data it backs up, and weekly full backups now take just hours instead of days. The company has nearly eliminated tape.

ExaGrid Found to be more Cost Effective than Tape

“Before we purchased our two-site ExaGrid system, we performed a cost analysis that showed that installing two ExaGrid systems would cost less over time than tape. When you consider the cost of tape, transportation, and the amount of time our IT staff had devoted to managing tape and performing restores, purchasing the ExaGrid system was a no-brainer,” said Morales.

ExaGrid and Arcserve Backup

Efficient backup requires close integration between the backup software and backup storage. That is the advantage delivered by the partnership between Arcserve and ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage. Together, Arcserve and ExaGrid provide a cost-effective backup solution that scales to meet the needs of demanding enterprise environments.

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).