Local Government Experiences Improved Backups with ExaGrid

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Jon Ward

The IT staff at the City and County of Honolulu (Honolulu County) struggled with long weekly backups to tape that consistently ran into Monday mornings, causing server and network slowdowns for its nearly 8,000 users.  Honolulu County employees support residents located in the urban district of Honolulu and the rest of the island of O’ahu along with several minor outlying islands.  Having a population of approximately 960,000, it’s the tenth largest municipality in the United States.

Long backup times were not only affecting users, but also required weekend management of this government entity’s tape library.  The combination of a large rapidly expanding backup window with the hours of IT time required to manage the tape library drove Honolulu County to seek out a better solution.

“When our backups began affecting server and network response times, we decided the time was right to look for a new system capable of reducing our backup windows and our reliance on tape,” said Tobin Hirota, systems analyst for the City and County of Honolulu.  “After researching various solutions, we decided to purchase the ExaGrid system because we liked its hardware-based approach and post-process data deduplication technology.”

Honolulu installed a single-site ExaGrid disk-based backup system with data deduplication in its disaster recovery center located 25 miles outside of Honolulu.  The ExaGrid system works along with Honolulu’s existing backup application, CommVault Simpana.  “We work under a pretty tight budget, so in addition to acquisition cost, we also looked closely at ongoing cost projections.  We didn’t want to get into a situation where we were constantly purchasing additional storage capacity, so data deduplication became a key factor in our evaluation,” said Hirota.  “We spent a lot of time comparing ExaGrid’s deduplication process to the competition, and we found significant advantages to its hardware-based, post-process approach.  ExaGrid’s deduplication technology is extremely effective at reducing data, and because the backups are completed after the data lands on the system, the jobs run as quickly as possible.”

Hirota said that today, the ExaGrid system delivers an overall deduplication ratio of 6.5:1, with some data reducing as high as 100:1, depending upon the type of data stored.  Since installing the ExaGrid system, backup jobs are completed well within Honolulu’s defined backup windows and are always completed by Monday mornings, so its servers and network run as efficiently as possible.

Hirota added, “ExaGrid’s customer support team has been simply top notch.  We’ve had the system installed for several years now and have always had consistently great support. The support staff is knowledgeable and easy to get in touch with if we have a question or concern.”

“We expanded the ExaGrid system to handle more data, and it was as easy as plugging another unit into the switch,” said Hirota.  “I used to spend weekends managing backups, but now they run effortlessly each and every night.  The system is easy to use and manage, upgrades are painless, and it’s backed by some of the best customer support in the industry.  We’ve been very happy with the ExaGrid system.”

To read the full case study, click here.

Posted in Blog, Customer Success Story, Disk Backup with Deduplication, Tape Backup | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Cloud HR solutions provider selects ExaGrid to reduce its backup window and costs

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Karla Smith

We’re seeing more and more cloud-based software providers move to ExaGrid’s disk-based backup with deduplication appliance to improve backup and recovery times, while gaining more control over retentions.

Synergy Data Systems case study is a perfect example.  Specializing in developing cloud-

Product photo

ExaGrid Product Photo

based (Software as a Service (SaaS)) systems with emphasis on payroll, employment, hiring, human resources, recruiting, and applicant tracking, Synergy needed a better backup solution to reduce their backup window and increase the number of weekly retentions.

When the IT staff at Synergy Data Systems realized their three-year-old Data Domain unit could not scale beyond two weeks of retention, they began looking at various products on the market that could improve retention to at least a month of data. In addition, Data Domain’s inline approach meant that deduplication was occurring prior to data being landed to disk, and backups were taking 13 hours to complete.

Elliot Bailey, Senior System Administrator at Synergy Data Systems shared his decision-making process, “We looked at a lot of different backup solutions, and in the end, we chose the ExaGrid system based on its lower cost, post-process data deduplication approach and superior scalability.”

The ExaGrid system worked along with a custom backup application written in-house that was optimized for the company’s environment.  “The ExaGrid system supports a wider range of applications and protocols than the Data Domain solution does, so we decided to write our own script based on TAR. With the ExaGrid system, we were able to specify what backup application or protocol we were using, which enables the deduplication technology to be optimized for it,” Bailey said. “Our data deduplication ratios average 36:1, but we have some data deduping as high as 95:1. The strong data deduplication technology enables us to keep six weeks of data on the system.”

“What really sold us on the ExaGrid system was its scalability.  With our old Data Domain unit, we needed to do a ‘forklift upgrade’ to improve retention. Now, with the ExaGrid system, we can easily add retention by plugging another unit into the GRID,” Bailey said. “We’ve been pleased with the ExaGrid. It’s a very well thought-out system that gave us the flexibility to create a backup solution optimized for our environment.”

Since installing the ExaGrid system, backup times have been reduced from 13 hours to 4 hours.  Bailey prefers ExaGrid’s post-process data deduplication over Data Domain’s inline method because “the deduplication is performed after the data hits a landing zone on the ExaGrid system, making for faster backup speeds”.

For more information about the differences between the architectures of ExaGrid versus other appliances, click here.

Posted in Blog, Customer Success Story, Disk Backup with Deduplication, ExaGrid vs EMC Data Domain | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Higher Education Looks to ExaGrid to Improve Data Backup Performance

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Jon Ward

Higher education institutions are increasingly choosing ExaGrid’s disk-based backup appliances with deduplication to gain faster backups and restores.

Higher Education data backup

Educational institutions are increasingly choosing ExaGrid’s disk backup architecture to meet their backup and recovery needs in large part because of ExaGrid’s unique approach to disk backup. ExaGrid combines compute with capacity as data grows in a “scale-out” grid architecture along with a landing zone for rapid restores. Other disk backup solutions adopt a more traditional “scale-up” architecture. The concept is simple, just adding disk capacity without adding compute resources results in downstream problems including ever-expanding backup windows, expensive forklift upgrades, and slow system restores. Tape copies offer slow recoveries including files, VMs, and objects that take hours versus minutes. ExaGrid’s unique approach of adding compute with capacity with a unique landing zone permanently shortens backup windows, eliminates expensive forklift upgrades, and provides the fastest full system restores of tape copies slow recoveries of files – while enabling the Rapid Restore™ of files, VMs and objects in minutes versus hours.

Higher education institutions that have turned to ExaGrid to solve their backup challenges include:

  • Keene State College: The Keene State College IT department selected ExaGrid to meet its requirement of shorter backup windows and improved reliability. After implementing the ExaGrid system, the team was able to reduce the back up time for the college’s primary file server by 95%  – from 20 hours to just 45 minutes.
  • Furman University: When Furman University needed to replace its aging tape library, the IT team selected ExaGrid to get faster, more reliable backups and reduce the amount of time spent managing backups. Since implementing the ExaGrid solution, Furman’s IT team reports a reduction in the amount of data for backup by 22:1, as well as 75% reduction in nightly backup times – from as much as six hours to 90 minutes.
  • Plymouth State University: The Plymouth State University IT department needed to move away from tape and chose disk-based backup to make its data protection processes faster and more reliable. ExaGrid was an ideal choice as the appliance worked with the University’s existing backup application and made switching from tape easy. Since installation, the University has cut its backup windows in half and achieved data deduplication ratios as high as 20:1 with 30 days of retention.
  • Sarah Lawrence College: Looking to move away from tape, Sarah Lawrence College’s IT team considered backing up to straight disk in a co-location facility, but chose ExaGrid’s disk backup with deduplication to reduce backup data and the associated costs of disk space, power draw, and rack space in the co-location facility. Since moving backups to ExaGrid, the IT department has seen the backup window reduced from between 24-36 hours weekly to 10-12 hours.

Marc Crespi, vice president of product management for ExaGrid Systems adds: “Higher ed. institutions experience the same pain points that have made ExaGrid’s approach to disk backup with deduplication an attractive solution. The higher education industry is seeing trends commensurate with most others including rapid data growth, backups running outside the available window, long restore times, and the management headaches associated with tape backup. And like other industries, IT managers at educational organizations have solved their backup challenges with ExaGrid’s proven grid architecture specifically built for backup, and optimized for backup and restore performance – delivering cost-effective scalability.”

Kevin Forrest, system administrator for Keene State College states: “Decreasing our backup windows and the time the IT team spent on backups each night was a huge factor in why we chose to implement an ExaGrid appliance. Since installation, backup times have decreased significantly and we’re all able to sleep better at night knowing our data will be completely backed up by the time we arrive to work each morning.”

Posted in Blog, Customer Success Story, Disaster Recovery, Tape Backup | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Better virtualized server backup with ExaGrid and Veeam

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Bill Hobbib

Vermont Energy Investment Corporation (VEIC) is one of our non-profit customers working in the energy consumption field, and VEIC is internationally recognized for its cutting edge work helping federal, state, county, and municipal governments develop and achieve energy conservation, energy efficiency, and renewable energy goals and initiatives.  Here is their story:

VEIC was previously backing up to a tape-based solution.  Their challenge is the same we hear from many of the companies we help:  backup jobs were running into the workday and slowing down the network.  VEIC’s backups ran 15 hours.  They were also in a 100% virtualized environment.  The organization’s IT staff decided to look for a new solution capable of reducing backup times as well as their reliance on tape.  “We decided to look at alternatives to tape due to its overall cost as well as its inherent reliability and data integrity issues,” said Ryan Gauthier, network administrator at VEIC.

After looking at several solutions, VEIC chose to evaluate ExaGrid’s disk-based backup system with data deduplication in-house after carefully comparing it with an EMC Data Domain solution.  “We liked ExaGrid’s post-process data deduplication approach better than EMC Data Domain’s in-line method. We felt that the ExaGrid system would give us better performance than the Data Domain system because it gets the data off the network as quickly as possible and then dedupes it afterwards,” said Gauthier. “After evaluating the system, we were confident that the ExaGrid would meet our performance requirements and data deduplication expectations.”

Since installing the ExaGrid system, incremental backups now run for between two and three hours, down from over 15 hours with the company’s old tape solution.  Full backups are also running more efficiently, and backup times have been reduced from three days to less than 24 hours using the ExaGrid system. When deciding the size system to purchase, VEIC felt confident that ExaGrid would be able to handle anticipated growth, as the GRID architecture can scale up by simply adding another appliance when data growth occurs.

In VEIC’s 100 percent virtualized environment, it made sense to them to install the ExaGrid system in a co-location center with Veeam to backup and protect data from over 65 virtual servers.  Gauthier reports that, “the two products work hand-in-hand to reduce the amount of data stored on the system.  Veeam first compresses the data and then sends it to the ExaGrid, and then the ExaGrid system deduplicates it and reduces it even more.  It’s impressive, considering that the data sent to the ExaGrid has already been compressed.”

VEIC credited ExaGrid in helping them not only solve their backup issues, but also supporting internal ‘green’ initiatives by eliminating their use of tape.  “We’ve been extremely pleased with the system.”

To learn more about how ExaGrid works with Veeam to improve virtualized server backup and recovery, click here.

Posted in Blog, Customer Success Story, Disk Backup with Deduplication | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Data Deduplication Approaches

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Bill Hobbib

In our last post, we discussed disk staging—how inserting disk in front of the tape library eliminates many of the problems of tape for backup.  In today’s post, excerpted from “Straight Talk About Disk Backup with Deduplication,” we discuss various deduplication algorithm approaches, including a short video showing why the approach is a critical factor when you consider the differences in disk required, long-term costs, and bandwidth needed to replicate data for offsite disaster recovery.

To comprehensively address the problems of tape, the optimal solution is to back up all data to disk onsite, replicate the backup data to disk offsite, and entirely eliminate tape along with its associated drawbacks—provided, as discussed previously, that the cost is equivalent to that of tape. Since disk costs more per gigabyte than tape, the only answer is to find a way to use far less disk to store the same amount of data. If straight disk costs 20 times the price of an equivalent-sized tape library plus tapes, then if you can store the total amount of data on 1/20th of the disk, the costs are now equivalent.

This short video describes several examples of where data deduplication comes into play, and the differences in approaches.

As described in the video, as you back up from week to week, industry statistics show that only about 2% of the data actually changes. So, for example, with straight disk, if you were backing up a 20TB full, after ten weeks, you would have 240TB of data just for the full backups. in effect you are storing the entire 20TB each week when only 400GB each week has changed.

Disk-based backup with deduplication compares incoming backup data to backup data previously stored, and only stores the changes or unique data from backup to backup. This dramatically changes the economics of disk backup. This is explained in the following example:

To keep it simple, we will only illustrate the weekly full backup as an example. If in week one, you send in a 20TB full backup, and then each subsequent week you send in the same 20TB with only 2% of the data (400GB) having changed, then you can just store the 400GB that is changing each week.  The total disk required with deduplication onsite to back up 20TB of primary data with 10 weekly fulls is:

  • First full backup deduplicated by 2:1 (10TB) = 10TB
  • 9 subsequent weekly fulls deduplicated by 50:1 (400GB each) = 3.6TB
  • Total: 13.6TB

In this simple example, the 13.6TB of storage with deduplication requires 7% of the 200TB with straight disk if all 10 weeks were stored at 20TB each.

Of course, there is much more to this, which is explained below.  In fact, the deduplication algorithms on the market in the leading products offer a 10:1 data reduction ratio to as much as a 50:1 reduction, with an average reduction of 20:1.

Deduplication Approaches and Deduplication Ratios

The range of deduplication from 10:1 to as much as 50:1 is due to two factors:

  1. The deduplication product itself: some products offer a more effective and refined approach to data deduplication than others.
  2. The mix of data types, which changes the overall deduplication ratio:
  • Compressed data and encrypted data does not deduplicate at all, so the deduplication ratio is 1:1.
  • Database data has a very high deduplication ratio and can get ratios of 100s to 1 to even 1,000s to 1.
  • Unstructured data may get 7:1 to 10:1.
  • Data from virtualized servers often has a significant amount of redundancy and can get very high deduplication ratios. When you have a normal mix of databases, unstructured data, VMs, compressed or encrypted data, for the leading products you will see an average deduplication ratio of 20:1.

Deduplication is accomplished in three major ways in the industry, as described in the table below for an average mix of data types:

The reason why the average data reduction matters is that a greater average data reduction uses less disk for longer term retention as data grows. It also impacts how much bandwidth is required to replicate data offsite for disaster recovery. Some may look at the up-front cost of the system and make their buying decision based on initial price. However, if the lowest priced system has a poor deduplication ratio, then it will prove to be far more expensive over time due to the cost of disk (since the amount of data and retention will continue to grow) as well as the additional WAN bandwidth that will be required.

In evaluating disk backup with deduplication solutions, you need to first understand the approach the product is using. In order to save both disk capacity and WAN bandwidth over time, choose a product that gets you the greatest deduplication ratio. Ask about the specific deduplication approach, as some literature will report high deduplication ratios using the best data type and not the mix of data that would be encountered in a real production environment. For example, industry marketing literature can say deduplication ratios of “up to” 50:1. The key phrase is “up to,” as these ratios are using a mix of data (e.g. databases) that achieve a high deduplication ratio. Your organization needs to know the deduplication ratio for a standard mix of product data, including databases and VMs as well as unstructured, compressed, and encrypted data.

To summarize, not all products achieve the same deduplication ratios since they use different algorithms for performing deduplication. The lower the deduplication ratio, the more disk capacity and WAN bandwidth is required over time resulting in higher overall costs. The true cost is the price up front and the cost of disk and bandwidth over time.

Posted in Blog, Disk Backup with Deduplication | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Straight Talk About Disk Staging in a Backup Environment

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Jon Ward

Because using disk for backup has historically been much

Disk staging, disk backup

Click for Marc Crespi, VP of Product Management, ExaGrid

more expensive compared to tape, most IT organizations have found a middle ground by using a small amount of disk between the backup/media server and the tape library to hold the most recent one to two weeks of backup data.

This allowed for faster and more reliable backups as well as faster and more reliable restores. However, keeping more than two weeks of onsite backups on straight disk is cost-prohibitive.

Here’s an Example:

Assume a Monday through Thursday rotation with:

  • Full backups of email and databases each night
  • Incremental backups on files, where only the files that have changed since the last backup are backed up each night

If the nightly backup is 5TB (about 25% of the full backup) and the weekend full backup (equal to the primary storage) is 20TB, then to keep one week of backups would require:

Calculation: 5TB x 4 nightlies (20TB) + the weekend full (20TB) = 40TB

To keep two weeks of backups for the same 20TB of primary storage, you would need 80TB of disk. For each additional week, you would need to add another 40TB. This is the reason why disk staging only augments tape but does not replace it, and why most organizations keep just one or two weeks of backups using disk staging and then put all the rest of the onsite retention and offsite disaster recovery on tape.

Disk staging is a pragmatic interim step and has eliminated some of the challenges of tape, but it is nonetheless a Band-Aid and has not eliminated all of the problems. Past the second week of retention, tapes are still used onsite and transported offsite for disaster recovery. Since tape is still used both onsite and offsite, the IT organization has to deal with tape failure rate issues, security challenges, IT management burden and downtime concerns.  According to Gartner and Storage magazine, 34% of companies backup their data to tape and do not test their backups. And an amazing 77% of those companies who do test their tape backups found backup failures (Boston Computing Network Data Loss statistics).

What is the solution? The goal should be for IT organizations to use disk exclusively, but to do so at the cost of tape. You’ll find that ExaGrid’s disk backup with deduplication is a great way to achieve your backup performance and budget goals.

Posted in Backup Applications, Blog, Disaster Recovery, Disk Backup with Deduplication, Tape Backup | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Bill Hobbib

As we all know, for decades, the traditional way to store offsite backups has been to make tape copies and vault them offsite. With data growth rates averaging 30% or more annually, most organizations who are still  storing tapes offsite for disaster recovery are looking for alternatives to tape to avoid the many known shortcomings of tape.

One of those alternatives is using a disk backup appliance with deduplication for onsite backups. With this approach, you could also replicate those backups offsite via WAN to another appliance at a second site geographically distant enough to offer disaster recovery (DR) protection. Today, approximately half of disk backup with deduplication users are doing just that.

But, as discussed in this article in FCW, “implementing a disaster recovery plan can be like eating vegetables, getting enough fiber and sleeping at least eight hours a night. Most people understand why these things are important, but few do them religiously.” The problem is that traditional DR methods require re-creating the full IT environment at a separate off-site facility to keep safe from unplanned IT outages. That just may not be possible or practical, and it’s a tough expense to justify, in view of tight IT budgets today.

For that reason, a growing number of IT managers looking at ways to change the equation, such as cloud-based disaster recovery, also known as DR-as-a-service (DRaaS).” With this option, you subscribe to a third-party cloud service to avoid the upfront costs of buying, installing and managing the necessary hardware and software. Instead, you pay a monthly fee for storing duplicate copies of data and applications at an off-site location. Depending on the amount of data backed up and your RTO and RPO objectives, an outsourced cloud-based solution for disaster recovery could be an attractive route to reducing or eliminating tape backup both onsite and offsite.

Gartner, Inc. predicted that by 2014, 30 percent of midsized companies (those with annual revenues or operating budgets of between $150 million and $1 billion) will have adopted cloud-based disaster recovery, which is up from just 1 percent in 2011. In addition, a survey by Forrester Research found that almost three quarters of IT managers whose organizations have already adopted infrastructure as a service said access to improved disaster recovery ranked as either very important or high on the importance scale in their decision, according to an October 2012 article by FCW magazine.

If you’re looking at a cloud-based solution, there are multiple options for cloud-based DR protection of backup data. Here are two of them:

  • Private Cloud for DR: disk backup with deduplication appliances offer the flexibility to build your own cloud-based DR infrastructure at an offsite data center. If you use a solution like ExaGrid, onsite appliances can replicate data to your data center in order to provide DR services to multiple departments, agencies, or facilities within your organization. As your DR needs grow, your ExaGrid cloud-based infrastructure can easily grow with your needs.
  • Secure Hybrid Cloud for DR: customers can leverage a secure hybrid cloud as a replication target for onsite backups to provide DR protection. One example is the partnership just announced between ExaGrid and ATScloud, which allows customers to pay a low monthly rate for a secure hybrid cloud infrastructure.

This new joint Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution, Secure BDRcloud, will enable ExaGrid customers to realize the following benefits:

  • Secure storage of data in Tier IV data centers throughout the US
  • No up-front capital costs for off-site storage of backup data for DR
  • Flexibility to pay for only what is used, avoiding the need to overbuy capacity
  • Ability to add or remove capacity quickly as needs dictate
  • Advanced options for DR audit and rapid recovery of backup data in the event of a disaster

One important point to note is that even though cloud-based DR has the advantages of reducing up-front capital costs, eliminating the IT staff management burden for disaster recovery, and obviating the requirement for additional data center power, cooling  and space, you need to avoid the pitfall of viewing DRaaS as a set-it-and-forget solution.

As the FCW article conveys, even with a cloud solution, you still have to perform the tasks of a DR program, including business impact assessments, risk analyses and tests with internal staff.  Though FCW concludes, “Some vegetables you just can’t avoid eating,” if cloud-based DR is a match for your business and IT needs, at least you benefit by eating the tastiest vegetables and passing off the less tasty ones to someone else.

Posted in Blog, Disaster Recovery | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Key Considerations for Disk Backup with Deduplication

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Bill Hobbib

With the move well underway by IT organizations to some form of disk-based backup with deduplication, many IT professionals do not realize there are a number of factors that should be considered when making the move to disk with deduplication, as it is not as straightforward as simply buying some disk.

The book, “Straight Talk About Disk Backup with Deduplication” goes into many of these factors, and below is a short video in which our VP of Product Management, Marc Crespi, describes some of the factors, key considerations and questions you might want to ask.

As is stated in the video and discussed in more detail in the book, unlike primary storage, from a technology perspective, disk backup solutions are based on hundreds of thousands of lines up to as many as a million lines of software code. Why? This tremendous amount of software is required to properly work with a backup application, deduplicate the data, store the deduplicated data and replicate the data.

It’s important to note that disk-based backup is not merely a commodity storage solution or a NAS share with storage plus deduplication. In fact, backup is a combination of a data movement problem, a data processing problem, and a data storage problem. Simply combining disk and deduplication is not the answer. That can lead to any of the following problems and consequences.

  1. Missing support for all of your backup apps and utilities
  2. Missing support for key features of your backup app
  3. Expanding backup window as data grows
  4. Costly forklift upgrades as data grows
  5. Slow restores of traditional full backups or images
  6. Slow offsite tape copy
  7. “Instant Recovery” of VMs takes hours vs minutes
  8. High cost for increased equipment needs over time
  9. Constant extra disk purchases from poor deduplication ratio
  10. Expensive bandwidth from poor deduplication ratio

Disk backup requires a purpose-built approach that positively impacts backup performance, the backup window, the time to restore traditional or image backups, make
offsite tape copies, perform instant recoveries and recover from a site disaster. The purpose-built approach also impacts the long-term costs of expansion over time.

Some IT organizations have taken the simple route of purchasing a disk backup system with deduplication from their primary storage, backup app, tape library, or server vendor only to find that they did not ask a fraction of the important questions before buying.

The video above and the Straight Talk eBook explains the various backup complexities, enabling you to ask the right questions and make the right decision for your specific environment and requirements.

We will give another excerpt from the book (about the topic of straight disk) in our next blog post, but if you want to read more right now, you can just download the eBook.

 

Posted in Disk Backup with Deduplication | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Manufacturer Avoids Data Domain Forklift Upgrade by Opting for ExaGrid

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Bill Hobbib

I recently had the pleasure of meeting with one of our customers in the Atlanta area, TenCate, and thought you would find their story of two backup upgrades within 3 years to be of interest.  TenCate is a multinational company that develops specialty materials ranging from ballistic armor protection to advanced composites and geosynthetics. TenCate, employs over 3,500 personnel in 15 countries and has annual sales in excess of $1 billion.

Here’s a short video, and below are highlights of the story, as told by Jayme Williams, Sr. Systems Engineer at TenCate.

For many years, like most other organizations, TenCate had been backing up to tape. They invested in a disk backup with deduplication solution from Data Domain about 3 years ago to help move away from tape.  Growing data and TenCate’s increasing use of virtualized machines multiplied their need for not only more storage, but a better methodology for handling backups, as they found themselves faced with a second “upgrade” within a short period of time.

“When the Data Domain system first went in, it was a physical world; since then, it’s changed dramatically. Not that long ago, we were 99% physical, and now we’re 99% virtual,” said Jayme. It got to the point where the Data Domain system just couldn’t keep pace with the amount of data that was being pushed to it, and I had to manually go into Backup Exec to compare the backup files to the data sets and delete data so that the next backup could finish.”

Williams thought that resolving the problem would be as easy as adding another tray of drives since his system was only half filled to capacity. That was when he learned that it’s not quite that simple. “I learned about forklift upgrades and how much it was going to cost me. I couldn’t believe it. We’re trying to use our budget intelligently, and that’s not intelligent to me. I turned to my reseller because I trust him, and he told me that they’re no longer recommending Data Domain and that I should look at ExaGrid,” he said.

Once he evaluated ExaGrid, he preferred the approach as well as the price. “If I had money to burn, then Data Domain might have been an option, but nowadays we’re trying to get everything we can out of what we spend. ExaGrid helped me to think about things differently. Of course you want to be able to complete backups quickly, but what about restores as well? With ExaGrid, the data is right there on the landing zone ready to go.”

“Our retention was down to a painful five days and that was for the more important data. We had to prioritize retention; for instance, our CIFS shares were down to three days of retention. Ideally, we want to have retention of at least four weeks across the board. We have two data centers and a number of remote sites, and with some shifts running 24/7, there never really was a good time for backup, never mind one that was taking 14 hours! I’d get calls from 2nd and 3rd shift employees saying that the system was too slow because of the backups.”

Williams says that he is now able to meet TenCate’s goal of four weeks’ retention. “I started out backing up to the ExaGrid with four weeks’ retention thinking I was going to have to collapse it. I’m actually extending it out now to see how far I can go.”  He reports a reduction in backup window from 14 plus hours (sometimes as high as 24) down to just 8 hours. The company installed two ExaGrid systems in two sites that cross-replicate using Backup Exec OST. The backup is sent by the media server to the local ExaGrid appliance, and is replicated to the remote ExaGrid. Upon completion, the Backup Exec catalog is updated with both the local and remote copies of the data, for easy recovery. By allowing the catalog to be updated with local and remote copies, restores from the remote appliance become much easier. Optimized duplication also allows for different local and remote retention policies, as well as automated tape copy from the remote site. Williams reports deduplication ratios from 13:1 to 78:1, depending on data type.

For more details, you can read the complete case study here.

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

ExaGrid Awarded InfoWorld’s 2013 Technology of the Year Award Winner

Posted on January 11, 2013 by Jon Ward

We are excited to announce that ExaGrid’s EX Series was selected as the “InfoWorld 2013 Technology of the Year Award” winner. Winners were announced by InfoWorld January 9, 2013. InfoWorld’s Test Center editors and reviewers select technologies with the goal of identifying the best and most innovative products on the IT landscape.

InfoWorld’s Test Center executive editor, Doug Dineley, explained:
“Many years ago we called these our ‘Product of the Year Awards.’ But ‘product’ just isn’t the right word,” said Doug Dineley, executive editor of InfoWorld’s Test Center. “Our Technology of the Year Awards are not merely the best ‘products’ in their class. These are the tools at the leading edge of technology innovation — the ones that are shaping the way we work and do business.”

ExaGrid EX Series – Matt Prigge, InfoWorld:

Although data deduplication has become fairly common, not all backup appliances are created equal; the real trick is providing seamless scalability and offsite replication capabilities. ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture guarantees that even as your data grows, your backup windows won’t. Each of the seven available models offers a balanced blend of performance and capacity, and they can combine into a single grid that spreads deduplicated data evenly across all grid members. This unique scale-out grid architecture – and a truly refreshing dedicated support model – sets ExaGrid apart from the pack and into a class of its own.

.  .  .

DETAILS…

The 2013 accolade comes on the heals of InfoWorld’s recent article entitled, “ExaGrid Aces Disk-to-Disk Backup: ExaGrid’s unique scale-out grid architecture makes for powerful, scalable, and uncomplicated disk-based backup and deduplication.”

The review offers an in-depth discussion of the technical differences between various deduplication approaches and architectures – inline vs. post-process deduplication and scale-up vs. scale-out/grid architecture. ExaGrid was rated “Excellent” with the top 2013 rating of 9.1. Here are a few excerpts from the review:

For enterprises seeking to escape the challenges of managing and maintaining tape backup architectures, disk-to-disk backup has been nothing short of a godsend. By replacing tape with disk for nightly backups and relegating tape to a long-term archival role, organizations of all sizes can shrink backup windows and provide near-instantaneous restores. While simple direct-attached storage may fit the bill for smaller organizations, larger enterprises wrestling with the task of protecting terabytes of data find themselves looking for functionality that plain old disk can’t provide.

That’s where deduplicating backup appliances [like ExaGrid’s EX Series] really shine. While there are a number of well-known vendors with very strong product offerings in this space (EMC Data Domain and Quantum, to name two), ExaGrid’s unique scale-out grid architecture and truly refreshing support model set it apart from the pack and place it in a class of its own…

…With rapidly growing mountains of data, leveraging dedupe in backup (if not primary storage) has almost become a necessity. However, as sexy as deduplication tech may be, it’s reached a point where the major dedupe vendors are, by and large, getting the same data reduction results from their deduplication engines. Today the differences reside mainly in the impact the deduplication engine has on backup and restore performance and how well the solution scales as backup data inexorably grows. This is where ExaGrid has chosen to invest the bulk of its R&D.

Scale-out (grid) vs. Scale-up Architecture
First, the ExaGrid EX series uses a scale-out grid architecture versus the scale-up architectures adopted by many of its rivals. That architecture allows you to combine multiple EX-series appliances — each equipped with dedupe and network capacity matched to its storage capacity — into a linearly scalable grid. This is important because it handily deals with the one true constant of any storage architecture today: rampant growth.

Because scale-up architectures are typically dependent on static controller resources that are sized when the system is initially purchased, an unexpected spate of growth may force you to replace those (often very expensive) controller resources well ahead of when you might have expected.
With ExaGrid’s scale-out approach, you simply add another appliance to the grid and scale your storage capacity and backup performance at the same time. It’s about as close to pay-as-you-go as you’ll get this side of the cloud…

Inline vs. Post-process Deduplication
Regarding deduplication approaches, ExaGrid’s EX series uses a post-process deduplication model. Backup data is written to the device in its fully “hydrated” form and is deduplicated after the backup process is complete. This is in contrast to the more popular inline deduplication model, which sees incoming data deduplicated as it is written to the device.

Additionally, some backup software platforms are able to leverage the backup appliance’s storage to start a virtual machine directly from the appliance and use the virtualization hypervisor’s storage migration functionality to copy the virtual machine back onto primary storage (Veeam’s Instant Recovery coupled with VMware Storage vMotion is a great example of this). While a great deal of attention has always been placed on shortening backup windows, accelerating restore windows is more important today than ever before. ExaGrid’s post-process approach to deduplication meshes perfectly with these heavy-duty use cases. 

ExaGrid in the lab

ExaGrid EX appliances are remarkably simple from a hardware perspective…In the end, I was slinging backups about an hour after opening the box…

If you’re working with explosive growth in your backups and are currently managing between 5TB and 75TB of data, I’d highly recommend taking the ExaGrid for a spin…ExaGrid has turned out a solid stack of software that does one thing and does it very well. Better yet, ExaGrid’s support model — which dedicates a named support engineer who is fully familiar with the backup applications you use — is a huge asset that is largely unparalleled in this space.

Above all else, if you’re in the market for a new backup appliance, remember that deduplication isn’t everything. In a day when even Microsoft’s Windows Server 2012 boasts impressive data deduplication capabilities, dedupe on its own is hardly a distinctive feature. What makes a backup appliance stand out is its ability to scale gracefully without decreasing performance and to handle complex multi-site replication topologies — two tasks ExaGrid’s EX-series appliances manage remarkably well.

Click to read the detailed InfoWorld ExaGrid review by Matt Prigge.

Posted in Blog, Disaster Recovery, Disk Backup with Deduplication, Industry Analyst Perspectives | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment