Å bytte til ExaGrid ga 50 % raskere backup for Ogilvie
Les suksesshistorien til ExaGrid og det kanadiske selskapet Ogilvie.
Ogilvie, a premier Canadian law firm, was built in 1920 on a tradition of building relationships
and working alongside its clients. Its corporate and commercial lawyers represent businesses
of all sizes and sectors, supporting clients in Alberta, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, British Columbia and Saskatchewan while headquartered in downtown Edmonton.
Switch from Dell EMC Data Domain to ExaGrid
Ogilvie had been backing up its data to a Dell EMC Data Domain using Veeam. As the Dell hardware aged, the IT team decided to refresh the backup environment. “We decided to look around and see if there were better options than buying a newer Data Domain,” said Brad Esopenko, System Administrator at Ogilvie. “I had learned about ExaGrid during a presentation at a client event that one of our vendors held a few years ago. When we were looking at alternate solutions, I decided to give ExaGrid a closer look. A standout feature to me was the fact that we could spin up backups on the ExaGrid system, which is something we couldn’t do with the Data Domain that we had.”
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 is possible because of ExaGrid’s Landing Zone – a high-speed disk cache on the ExaGrid appliance that retains the most recent backups in complete form. Once the primary storage environment has been brought back to a working state, the VM running on the ExaGrid appliance can then be migrated to primary storage for continued operation.
50 % Faster Backups and Quick Restores
Esopenko backs up Ogilvie’s data on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis to the ExaGrid system, sing Veeam. Since switching to ExaGrid, he has added backups on Saturday and Sunday, and as been impressed that adding backups has not caused a strain on storage capacity.
“Our backups take half the time now, from 16 hours with Data Domain to eight hours using ExaGrid, and it’s been nice to close the backup window a bit. Restoring files is a quick process, too, especially because data doesn’t need to be rehydrated when it’s restored from ExaGrid’s Landing Zone,” said Esopenko.
ExaGrid writes backups directly to a diskcache 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 while providing full system resources to the backups for the shortest backup window.
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.
Veeam uses the information from VMware and Hyper-V and provides deduplication on a “per-job” basis, finding the matching areas of all the virtual disks within a backup job and using metadata to reduce the overall footprint of the backup data. Veeam also has a “dedupe friendly” compression setting which further reduces the size of the Veeam backups in a way
that allows the ExaGrid system to achieve further deduplication. The net result is a combined Veeam and ExaGrid deduplication rate of 6:1 upwards to 10:1, which greatly reduces the amount of disk storage required.
ExaGrid Support Helps Keep System Well-Maintained
Esopenko appreciates the high level of support he receives from ExaGrid. “Our ExaGrid support engineer takes good care of us. I like that we work with one person, who is assigned to our account and knows our environment. They keep an eye on our system and install all the upgrades for us, which is a different experience than we’ve had with our Dell EMC Data Domain hardware. Both ExaGrid and Veeam are great to work with, and we’ve had no problems with the combined solution.”
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.
ExaGrid and Veeam
The combination of ExaGrid’s and Veeam’s industry-leading virtual server data protection solutions allows customers to utilize Veeam Backup & Replication in VMware, vSphere, and
Microsoft Hyper-V virtual environments on ExaGrid’s disk-based backup system. This combination provides fast backups and efficient data storage as well as replication to an offsite location for disaster recovery.
ExaGrid fully leverages Veeam’s built-in backup-to-disk capabilities, and ExaGrid’s adaptive data deduplication provides additional data and cost reduction over standard disk solutions. Customers can use Veeam Backup & Replication’s built-in sourceside deduplication in concert with ExaGrid’s disk-based backup system with Adaptive Deduplication to further shrink backups.
About ExaGrid
ExaGrid provides tiered backup storage with a unique disk-cache Landing Zone, long-term retention repository and scale-out architecture. ExaGrid’s Landing Zone enables the fastest backups, restores, and instant VM recoveries. The retention repository offers the lowest cost for long-term retention. ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture includes full appliances in a scalable system. Learn more at www.exagrid.com.