Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid and Veeam Synergy Takes West Vancouver Municipality to New Heights

Customer Overview

West Vancouver is located on Vancouver’s North Shore in British Columbia, Canada on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples. The District of West Vancouver is committed to governing under fiscal best practices, to the highest ethical standards, with a commitment to transparency, and with the goal of including as many citizens as possible in Council meetings, community consultations and the democratic process.

Key Benefits:

  • Works seamlessly with Veeam 50% reduction in the backup window
  • Restores that used to take hours from tape now take just minutes
  • District of West Vancouver values ExaGrid’s reliability and quality support
  • Competitive & honest pricing
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The District of West Vancouver has been using Veeam for their VMware backups and they were backing up to a Synology disk array. For longer-term retention, they were using a small HP tape library. “My team was tired of the amount of time they had to spend with the tape swaps for the longer-term retention, so we started looking at what options were out there that included built-in ransomware protection,” said Ben Shaw, Senior IT Manager at District of West Vancouver.

There were many reasons to seek a new solution: Ease of use, the quest for a solution that is purpose-built, and finally, performance. “We were looking for something that would shrink our backup window as much as possible. It came down to a few products – ExaGrid, Cohesity, and Dell Data Domain. Our Veeam backup target just works, so we were not going to change our backup app.”

“We did a POC with ExaGrid and there was not a lot to do with it. It just worked. We haven’t even had to think about it. We just set it and forget it, and it just does what it needs to. We’ve restored from it for operational restores, and it’s been fantastic. Look, it’s simple. It works. We don’t have time to learn a new platform. The price was also more competitive on a per-terabyte basis.”

"All in all, it’s simple and easy to use, functional, reliable, and appropriately priced. I can’t ask for anything else. It’s one of the few products I don’t worry about. It is doing exactly what it promised. "

Ben Shad Senior Manager IT, District of West Vancouver

Improved Backup Performance reduce backup window by 50%

According to Ben, the most notable difference is that backups finish very fast. “Our backup went from eight hours to completing in less than four hours. The big deal is that my team spends no time on backups right now. We don’t spend any time managing backups. We get a report every morning about our nightly backups.” ExaGrid and Veeam can instantly recover a VMware virtual machine by running it directly from the ExaGrid appliance in the event that the primary storage VM becomes unavailable. This instant recovery is possible because of ExaGrid’s Landing Zone – a high-speed disk cache on the ExaGrid appliance that retains the most recent backups in their complete form. Once the primary storage environment has been brought back to a working state, the VM backed up on the ExaGrid appliance can then be migrated to primary storage for continued operation.

“ExaGrid is handling our long-term retention, so we don’t keep it. We want to have seven years for our financial data. We’re not doing archiving. We’re just doing long-term retention for financial data and database information – and we have plenty of storage left. In a couple of years, if we need to add expansion, it’s super easy to do. You just get the hardware, patch it in, and just let it automatically be consumed. It’s really nice.”

Knowledgeable Support Matters

“We just appreciate good support. Our ExaGrid support engineer is just so great. He’s always there. I only have good things to say about the ExaGrid product and services. Even the install was easy and seamless.”

The ExaGrid system was designed to be easy to set up and operate. ExaGrid’s industry-leading level 2 senior support engineers are assigned to individual customers, ensuring they always work with the same engineer. A customer never has to repeat themselves to various support staff, and issues get resolved quickly.

Security is Key for Business Continuity

“We’ve appreciated that little extra checkmark and security of having the Retention Time-Lock feature. We also use ExaGrid as the target, not just through Veeam, but we’re using it as a target for our custom Veeam configuration backup. It’s super tiny, but we’re backing it up to ExaGrid Share, which is great. We’re also backing up our SQL, like managed SQL backups, using Microsoft on SQL server. We’re backing those up to ExaGrid as a target as well. That share setup was extremely simple to do. Another win we’re very happy with!”

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).

 

ExaGrid and Veeam

Veeam’s backup solutions and ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage combine for the industry’s fastest backups, fastest restores, scale-out storage as data grows, and a strong ransomware recovery story – all at the lowest cost in the industry.