KPMG is a global organization of independent professional services firms providing Audit, Tax, and Advisory services. MESAC (Middle East, South Asia, and Caspian) is one of the largest and fastest growing sub-regions within the KPMG network.
Within the MESAC region, KPMG member firms have a presence in 21 countries and territories, with over 10,000 people working together across more than 30 office locations to support clients. In addition, they are one of the largest professional service networks in the region.
"Our data profile is huge. ExaGrid has a massive capacity for accommodating that kind of data. Restores are also very quick, which reduces stress on our IT team."
By helping organizations mitigate risks, KPMG also looks to take their IT solutions to the next level. Leading with a commitment to quality and integrity for client success is what matters most.
Mahaboob Ahmad, IT infrastructure services at KPMG MESAC, manages the firm’s backups using the combined solution of ExaGrid and Veeam. Before ExaGrid, KPMG MESAC used tape, which was time-consuming and expensive. Every single day, someone on his team would need to drive 3-4 hours to go to and from the data center to change tapes. Now, everything is right at their fingertips. KPMG MESAC has four ExaGrid appliances geographically dispersed for disaster recovery.
“ExaGrid integrates seamlessly with Veeam, our backup application of choice. I am very satisfied with this solution and feel that every part of our backup storage is maximized for cost, security, and efficiency,” said Ahmad.
The ExaGrid system is easy to install and use and works seamlessly with the industry’s leading backup applications so that an organization can retain its investment in its existing backup applications and processes. In addition, ExaGrid appliances can replicate to a second ExaGrid appliance at a second site or to the public cloud for DR (disaster recovery).
Ahmad finds that ExaGrid easily accommodates KMPG MESAC’s large data footprint. “Our full backup is close to 250TB of data. Our environment has over 150 virtual servers, consisting of internal applications, external applications, and file servers. One of our file servers is over 10TB alone. We have eight file servers to support over 2,200 MESAC staff members — so our data profile is huge. ExaGrid has a massive capacity for accommodating that kind of data. Restores are also very quick, which reduces stress on our IT team,” he said.
“All kinds of backups are happening around the clock. ExaGrid’s data deduplication technology is very effective at reducing our data and it enables us to make the most of our disk space. This is important as our financial requirement demands seven years of retention. The data deduplication is automatic and happens in the background, so we never even know it is occurring.”
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 for a strong recovery point (RPO). As data is being deduplicated to the repository, it can also be replicated to a second ExaGrid site or the public cloud for disaster recovery (DR).
Veeam uses changed block tracking to perform a level of data deduplication. ExaGrid allows Veeam deduplication and Veeam dedupe-friendly compression to stay on. ExaGrid will increase Veeam’s deduplication by a factor of about 7:1 to a total combined deduplication ratio of 14:1, reducing the storage required and saving on storage costs up front and over time.
Ransomware is a major concern for many organizations and Ahmad is glad that ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage solution includes a ransomware recovery strategy. “ExaGrid’s Retention Time-Lock (RTL) feature is comforting to have in place. Our RTL policy was straightforward to set up with assistance from our ExaGrid support engineer. Everything is running automatically so there is no need to do any manual steps on our end, which is a win for my team,” he said.
ExaGrid appliances have a network-facing disk-cache Landing Zone where the most recent backups are stored in an undeduplicated format for fast backup and restore performance. Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing tier called the Repository Tier, for longer-term retention. ExaGrid’s unique architecture and features provide comprehensive security including Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery (RTL), and through the combination of a non-network-facing tier (tiered air gap), a delayed delete policy, and immutable data objects, backup data is protected from being deleted or encrypted. ExaGrid’s offline tier is ready for recovery in the event of an attack.
Ahmad is impressed with the level of support he receives from ExaGrid. “The ExaGrid support model is very unique. Our assigned ExaGrid support engineer proactively lets us know if anything comes up, and we have high confidence because they we know that our system health is being monitored. We also get system alerts and notifications. Our support engineer is knowledgeable and very proactive and will keep chasing an issue until it is resolved.”
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. Customers never have to repeat themselves to various support staff, and issues get resolved quickly.
ExaGrid’s award-winning scale-out architecture provides customers with a fixed-length backup window regardless of data growth. Its unique disk-cache Landing Zone allows for the fastest backups and retains the most recent backup in its full undeduplicated form, enabling the fastest restores.
ExaGrid’s appliance models can be mixed and matched into a single scale-out system allowing a full backup of up to 2.7PB with a combined ingest rate of 488TB/hr, in a single system. The appliances automatically join the scale-out system. Each appliance includes the appropriate amount of processor, memory, disk, and bandwidth for the data size. By adding compute with capacity, the backup window remains fixed in length as the data grows. Automatic load balancing across all repositories allows for full utilization of all appliances. Data is deduplicated into an offline repository, and additionally, data is globally deduplicated across all repositories.
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.
Veeam’s backup solutions and ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage combine for the industry’s fastest backups, fastest restores, a scale-out storage system as data grows, and a strong ransomware recovery story – all at the lowest cost.