ExaGrid's Eye on Deduplication

One of the great things about ExaGrid is that our customers are delighted with the operational gains they see from using our disk backup with data deduplication appliance.  Of more than 1,700 systems across nearly 500 customers, more than 130 customers have shared their success stories, and a recent one is BankWest.  If you are facing issues with data growth, long backup times, and IT time spent managing backups, perhaps there are some worthwhile lessons in their experience.

As the bank's data grew, their previous tape library could not keep up.  Their team would start a full backup on Friday and it would be completed the following Monday or Tuesday often delaying the differentials scheduled Monday - Thursday.  Since implementing ExaGrid, BankWest has seen dramatic results. The company's backup window has been cut by a factor of 90%--from three to four days to now only about six to eight hours. In addition, BankWest's IT department saves about four hours a week that used to be spent on administering and managing tape.

According to BankWest's IT manager, "Being able to write to disk to ExaGrid made the managing of our backups 10 times more efficient. We were spending several hours a week just holding the tape library's hand and monitoring tapes and switching them back and forth. Now, we are only spending a matter of minutes just to verify that everything is running smoothly."

For those who need to justify moving from tape to disk, this is how BankWest described their situation. The bank looked into upgrading its tape drives with new hardware and compared that with moving to a disk-based system. "After evaluating all of our options and comparing tape and disk, it was clear that a disk was the best solution for us.  Continuing with tape was going to cost us too much money and it wouldn't provide us with the scalability that we had to have."

 "In the end, it was easy to justify the cost of moving to ExaGrid. When we considered the cost of upgrading our tape libraries and the ongoing cost associated with maintaining and managing tapes, it was a no brainer financially."

 We hope this story is helpful for you.  Best wishes for an enjoyable holiday season!

GreenBank is a Tennessee chartered commercial bank with more than 60 branch locations, and after having grown quickly by acquiring several other banks, found that their tape library could no longer keep up. Weekend full backups were taking three days to complete and incremental backups were taking over 24 hours. With banks open seven days a week, it was critical for their backups to be completed within their backup windows every night, but the tape backups took too long and often failed before completion. Restores were also time-consuming and difficult to perform using tape. Jason O'Dell, IT manager for GreenBank, described their old backup application, tapes and tape drives as "a nightmare to get everything properly backed up."

GreenBank has one ExaGrid system located in its Greeneville datacenter, and a second system to replicate data to its disaster recovery site. Incremental backup times have been cut in half and are now completed in less than 12 hours, and full backups have been cut from three days to just 24 hours. In addition, GreenBank is now cost-effectively retaining nearly three months of data, and their helpdesk easily performs restores for end users, cutting time-consuming tape inventory delays and restores. The cost savings on tape alone is nearly $24,000.

Jason also commented, "With ExaGrid our backups are now completed consistently every night and our IT staff spends far less time managing and administering backup processes and tapes. The ability to reliably backup all the data received from many servers at many locations has allowed the team to work on more strategic projects."  To read the full story, click here.

The InfoWorld 100 award comes on the heels of two other awards that we did not have the chance to blog. Last month, ExaGrid's disk backup with data deduplication system was named winner of the Tech Awards Circle, taking Bronze in the Best Midrange Hardware category.

And in mid-September, ExaGrid's customer, Gardner Trucking, was named winner of Info Security Products Guide's 2009 Best Deployment Scenario Award in Data Recovery. Gardner chose ExaGrid's disk-based backup system with data deduplication based on its scalability and unique approach to data deduplication, and beyond those factors, the ExaGrid system also cost approximately 25 percent of the cost of competitive solutions. Coincidentally, two days after they installed the ExaGrid system and switched from tape, a database crashed. With the ExaGrid backup system in place, it took only 25 minutes to restore the data, but most importantly, Gardner avoided the two days of system downtime and an estimated loss of $200,000 in business and productivity they would have incurred if they had to restore their database from tape. To read more about this case study, visit http://www.infosecurityproductsguide.com/casestudies/.