InfoWorld Review: ExaGrid Aces Disk-to-Disk Backup

Posted on January 4, 2013 by Bill Hobbib

InfoWorld has just published a review of ExaGrid’s disk backup with deduplication appliances, 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 entire review is a worthwhile read, as it 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 a 9.1 rating. 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 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 vs. scale-up
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 might 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
Second, on the deduplication front, ExaGrid’s EX series uses a post-process deduplication model. This means that the 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 multisite replication topologies — two tasks ExaGrid’s EX-series appliances manage remarkably well.

To read the entire InfoWorld review by Matt Prigge, click here.

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ExaGrid Top Five Predictions for Backup and Recovery Market in 2013

Posted on December 26, 2012 by Bill Hobbib

Last week, ExaGrid released our top five predictions for the worldwide backup and recovery market in 2013.

As organizations cope with data growth and look to gain greater operational efficiency and increased value from IT investments, we’ve identified the following trends as ones that will continue transforming backup and recovery in the coming year:

  1. Disk continues to replace tape:  The movement away from tape as a primary backup target to disk-based systems with deduplicationas a primary backup target will accelerate. The market for purpose-built disk backup appliances will approach $3 billion dollars in annual revenues, according to IDC.
    • Appliances will continue to be the preferred form factor for this movement.
  2. SMBs looking to the cloud for primary backups:  Small businesses across all industries will continue to turn to a series of cloud providers for their end-to-end backup needs, including using the cloud as the primary backup target.
  3. Mid-market to enterprise will consider cloud for DR:  Mid-market to enterprise companies will begin to investigate selective use of the cloud for storing disaster recovery copies of their backup data.
    • These enterprises recognize the cloud cannot serve as the primary target (as it can for small business) due to the logistics of initial backup and subsequent recoveries.
    • Initially, the cloud will serve as a repository for lower priority data and longer term archiving of backup.
  4. Instant recovery will gain broader adoption:  Data protection software products will continue to bring innovative features to market that allow customers to instantly leverage their disk-based backups in production in the event of failure, versus going through prolonged restore procedures.
    • Users will benefit from significantly reduced downtime—typically in minutes with instant recovery from disk backup, instead of hours—and therefore increased productivity.
    • Instant recovery of virtual machines is a key example of this growing trend.
  5. Advanced capabilities bring backup window relief:  IT professionals will continue to leverage features that reduce the need to move full copies of data during backups, providing continued relief to the backup window problem.

This is what ExaGrid sees as the top 5 trends and our predictions for backup and recovery in 2013. Let us know if you agree, disagree or would like to add to the list.

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Saving Money on Disk Backup: Scale-Up vs Scale Out Architecture

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Bill Hobbib

There is a lot of discussion in the storage industry in regard to “scale-up” versus “scale-out” architectures for backup and recovery. More and more organizations are reducing or eliminating the use of tape by deploying disk-based appliances that use deduplication. But the architectural approach used by the appliance vendor can make a significant difference to the performance, scalability and total cost of the selected solution. IT organizations who have already moved to disk with deduplication using a front-end controller architecture with disk shelves know very well the costs of “forklift upgrades.”  This tech primer just published in Network World, “How to choose between scale-up vs. scale-out architectures for backup and recovery” gives some additional perspective.  Here are a few excerpts:

  • Scale-up typically refers to architectures that use a single, fixed resource controller for all processing. To add capacity, you attach disk-shelves up to the maximum for which the controller is rated.
  • Scale-out typically refers to architectures that scale performance and capacity separately or in lockstep by not relying on a single controller, but instead provide processing power with each unit of disk.

On the face of it, scale-up architectures represent a simple premise: Disk plus deduplication creates a backup and recovery appliance that can meet the economics of backup. But backup and recovery is more than just a storage problem. In fact, backup and recovery is a data movement problem, a data processing problem and a storage problem.

Scale-up approaches offer several advantages, but unfortunately, data growth leads to performance problems in a scale-up architecture.Because the architectures include a single computing element that houses all network ports, processor and memory, their performance is limited by the capabilities of that component. As data inevitably grows, only capacity (meaning more workload) can be added until such time that the maximum capacity of that controller is reached.

This leads to two significant problems:

• During the period of data growth, the length of all processes also grows. This includes backup time, deduplication time, replication time and recovery time. Obviously, if you throw more workload at a fixed resource and do not provide additional processing power, it takes longer to complete that work.

• At maximum capacity, you are faced with a fork-lift upgrade to a more powerful controller, which can be costly.

Scale-out architectures handle data growth differently. In a scale-out architecture, each building block of the architecture either does include or can include additional elements of performance, including network ports, processors, memory and, yes, disk. As a result, as data grows and capacity is added, processing power is also added.

This means data growth does not lead to longer times for backups, deduplication, replication and recovery. If the workload is quadrupled, the processing power of the architecture is also quadrupled. And there is no “maximum capacity.” While vendors may limit how many devices can coexist in a singly managed system, there is never the need for a forklift upgrade as devices can continue to be added individually, even if that means starting a “new system.”

The piece continues to cover other issues, including system sizing and technology obsolescence implications.  Click here to read the rest of the article.

If you are already using a front-end controller scale-up system from a vendor such as EMC Data Domain, you may be experiencing the challenges and high ongoing costs specific to the EMC Data Domain front-end controller with disk shelf “scale up” architecture. These problems are solved by ExaGrid’s “scale out” GRID architecture and unique approach to disk backup scalability.

Because ExaGrid’s scale out GRID architecture adds full servers – including memory, processor, disk, and bandwidth – to maintain consistently fast backup performance and a fixed length backup window as data increases, customers can confidently purchase a system that will scale to handle future data growth, keep the backup window from expanding and avoid those costly forklift upgrades associated with the scale-up architecture. In many system configurations, ExaGrid disk backup with deduplication is about 50% the cost of EMC Data Domain in system and maintenance costs over a 3-year period.

Among the 50+ organizations that have either replaced their Data Domain system with ExaGrid or have added ExaGrid’s appliance to an existing backup environment still using Data Domain is Bollinger Inc., the 22nd largest insurance broker in the U.S.  They had been backing up data with an EMC Data Domain solution. The company needed to be able to retain 12 weeks of data for disaster recovery, but could only keep two weeks of data on its system. Realizing that expansion of the Data Domain system would be cost prohibitive, Bollinger decided to install two ExaGrid systems to back up its data. The company achieved superior data deduplication ratios and offsite replication performance with the ExaGrid system, and ExaGrid’s scalable approach ensures that Bollinger can meet its backup needs without costly forklift upgrades in the future.

Tom Godon, Assistant Vice President and Network Engineer for Bollinger Inc. said:

“Retention was a major issue for us, and when we realized we would need to add more disk to our Data Domain system, we decided to look for alternatives. The ExaGrid system was about half the cost of a new, comparable EMC Data Domain system. In addition to the improved retention and better transmission speeds between sites, the ExaGrid system is easy to maintain and has a user-friendly interface compared to the more complex UI of the Data Domain system. With the ExaGrid’s scalability, our backup needs are met for the foreseeable future.”

This situation is just one example of how customers are seeing the value of a scale out architecture.  If you would like to see how ExaGrid can save you up to 50% vs EMC Data Domain over 3 years, click the link below.

Request Budgetary Pricing

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Consolidating Data Protection at the Disk Backup Appliance

Posted on November 20, 2012 by Bill Hobbib

An excellent article in InformationWeek by Storage Switzerland’s lead analyst, George Crump, just caught our attention. It’s entitled,”Consolidation at the Disk Backup Appliance,” and it makes a compelling case for IT to continue using multiple best-of-breed backup applications or utilities, and employ a target-side disk backup appliance as the consolidation point.

George reflects on a question recently posed to him, “How do we consolidate the data protection process?” In a previous column, he had written about how the constant change facing data centers–such as new applications and operating environments added–creates new data protection challenges, such that it is difficult for many IT organizations to find a single data protection solution to address all the demands of an enterprise.

For example, you could be running a virtualization-specific backup application such as Veeam Backup and Replication or Dell (Quest) vRanger for the 50% of the environment that is virtualized, and a different traditional backup application for the other 50% of the environment still running on physical servers. Or, you may be looking to support Oracle RMAN backups, direct-to-disk Microsoft SQL dumps, direct VMDK backups, UNIX utilities such as UNIX TAR or another application or point solution with a specialized backup utility.

This creates a major challenge for IT professionals charged with protecting an organization’s data assets. Crump cites a recent webinar where none of the survey respondents had standardized on one backup application, and over 50% of the respondents had more than three backup applications in use. Given this reality, the idea of consolidating multiple applications back up to a single appliance capable of supporting those multiple backup apps or utilities makes a lot of sense.  He says:

Most agree they can’t get data protection done with one backup application. It may turn out that the most viable option is for consolidation to occur at the backup appliance.

Most backup appliances today are disk-focused systems. Historically, the value of these systems has been to provide deduplication and drive down the cost of disk-based backup, striving to offer parity with tape. They also allowed multiple backup applications to write to them at the same time. Now they are expanding their value by including integration to specific backup applications.

This gives the backup application greater control over the disk backup appliance. For example, the backup application can control the deduplication appliance’s replication function. This allows it to trigger which backup jobs are replicated to the remote site and when they are triggered. In some cases it can also pre-seed the indexes at the DR site so that a preconfigured backup server is instantly ready to begin restoring data.

He further discusses how most backup applications and utilities support these capabilities and can leverage current disk backup appliances technology, thus letting individual groups select their own backup application, with the disk backup appliance serving as the consolidation point.

Two other important capabilities cited are support for tape and strong reporting. Because many large enterprises are still using tape alongside disk–some surveys show it’s about 70% of users today–it is essential that a disk backup appliance can copy data to tape for offsite disaster recovery. In addition, reporting capabilities of disk backup appliances need to be able to correlate via the backup application what the backup application indicates it sent to the primary site or secondary site system with what the appliance has actually stored.

If you are considering or evaluating disk-based backup appliances with deduplication and have multiple backup applications or utilities to be supported, you should ask if the approach is truly heterogeneous? Can the disk backup appliance take in and deduplicate data from multiple backup applications and utilities? If so, which ones? Can it support backups from specialty virtualized server backup applications such as Veeam or Dell/Quest vRanger? Or can it only take in data from its own agents and not outside data?

You should also note the differences between two types of disk backup solutions.   Traditional backup software with added deduplication that is preloaded on a storage server and marketed as an “appliance,” by definition, only supports its own backup application with its own backup server software and its own backup client agents. Performing deduplication in the backup software or media server in this type of solution limits the ability to have all data from all sources stored and deduplicated in a single target device. This type of solution is not able to support backup data from other backup applications or utilities, and thus cannot function as the consolidation point.

The good news is that the capability to serve as a consolidation point for multiple backup apps and utilities exists today in purpose-built disk backup with deduplication appliances. Target-side appliance systems such as ExaGrid support industry-leading backup applications and agents, as well as specialized applications and utilities, as well as specialized tools and utilities including Veeam Backup and Replication, Dell (Quest) vRanger, Bridgehead, Lightspeed, Redgate, SQLSafe, SQL Dumps, Oracle RMAN dumps, VMware backup, CIFS for Windows and NFS for Linux and UNIX, and direct UNIX TAR files. You can readily use a traditional backup application alongside any these specialized solutions and utilities and consolidate the data protection in the purpose-built target-side appliance, such as ExaGrid.  ExaGrid can run at a primary site and copy backups to tape for offsite DR, or you can eliminate tape entirely, if desired, by running an ExaGrid disk-based system at the primary site and replicate the changed bytes over a WAN with 50:1 efficiency to a secondary site for offsite disk-based DR.

In view of the reality that we are nowhere near the point where IT can have just one backup app to meet all needs across the enterprise, purpose-built backup appliance solutions that offer the capability to support multiple apps and utilities could well be the backup consolidation solution that you and other IT professionals are looking for.

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Seven Steps to Protect Your Data from Disaster

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Bill Hobbib

With the devastating damage from Hurricane Sandy, we’re very concerned about the effects of the storm for both the East coast, and for many people in other parts of country who are feeling the effects. In the midst of the tragedy and damage, we are also finding a number of IT organizations recently asking for advice as they become more mindful of their DR plans.

Disasters can happen at any time and to anyone.  They can come in the form of a natural disaster such as a hurricane, tornado, flood or they can be of other types such as fire, theft, power outage, virus attack, internal water leak, etc.

While your DR plan should cover the protection of your hardware, applications and your data, your data is typically the most valuable asset for any organization because without it, most companies would be out of business.  In today’s age, most of this data is stored on file-servers or in virtual machines in the form of Exchange, SQL and application created data or regular file-system files. So all your data should be backed up regularly with a disaster recovery and backup plan that meets your company’s requirements.

Should you aim for 100% uptime?  Howard Marks, writing for Network Computing, argues against that as a goal in his recent piece “Superstorm Sandy Lessons: 100% Uptime Isn’t Always Worth It:

While disaster recovery planning is important, the best DR plans don’t provide 100% uptime in every emergency. If you’re not a huge Web presence like Amazon, or a bank, or a multinational like Exxon-Mobile, it may actually be a better business decision to take some downtime when a 100-year event comes straight at you.

Yes, create a DR plan, and make sure your data is off site so your whole business doesn’t end when the data center is wiped out. But also recognize that from a dollars-and-sense point of view, maintaining 100% uptime through every emergency just may not be worth it.

That said, even if 100% uptime is not the goal, here are seven key points when planning for disaster recovery we thought you would find helpful:

  1. Backup all data to a reliable backup target. When backing up your data, ensure it is segmented so during the restore process you can quickly restore your most critical data first.  Your primary goal is to get your business up and running at some level–even in a degraded mode–while other systems are brought back on line.  When planning the order of restoration, understand what basic infrastructure must be in place first before bringing the first critical business systems online. When choosing the backup target device, make sure you choose something that is good for your everyday business and disaster recovery scenarios.
  2. Keep a copy of all critical data offsite.  There must be a reliable strategy to get data backups offsite; in this manner you will have data onsite when needed for most restores and offsite in the event of a disaster to your primary or production site.  When choosing the offsite location, your goal is to bring your business back up to a running order in the shortest time.
  3. Keep an emergency list of all necessary personnel and managers available along with multiple contact numbers.
  4. Test your DR plan periodically. Your complete DR plan should be reviewed a minimum of every year since your business and systems are constantly changing.  Periodically test your plan and at least verify sections of the data recovery to verify you can get your operations up and running. These tests must be thorough enough to ensure that the backups are good, your data can be recovered and your systems can become operational.   The best test would be to take a weekend day and try to get your operations back up and operational within some number of hours.  This may be 8 hours or 36 hours.  You must decide what is good enough for your business as most availability varies with cost.
  5. Ensure you have an active support contract with your key appliance, system and application vendors so they can assist you in the event of a disaster.  Make sure you understand their capabilities to assist during a disaster.
  6. Comply with regulations at your disaster recovery site.  While you are operating from your disaster recovery site, you still should comply with any regulations and keep with your current data backup plan.
  7. Update the disaster recovery plan regularly.  Since your environment and data is changing every day and there will always be new threats, you must constantly be updating your procedures to keep the disaster recovery plan ready.

One approach to better protecting your data is to use a disk-based backup appliance with deduplication, which provides rapid data recovery for both files and system restorations, and also offers the capability to perform rapid restores of older data without the need to go offsite to retrieve a tape. A key advantage of using a disk-based deduplication appliance with replication is that the data will automatically get replicated to the remote site once the backup is complete on the primary site.  The only limitation is the bandwidth of the link between the sites.  Since the data is deduplicated, often with a ratio of 50:1, only 20 GB will need to be transferred per 1 TB of data that is backed up.

With the proper disaster recovery planning and systems, you should be able to reduce your company’s overall risk.  Remember, to test the plan regularly and make sure it continues to meet the goals for your company.

If you are interested in best practices for DR with virtual servers, check out “The Essential Guide to Legacy-Free Disaster Recovery.”

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Hurricane Sandy

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Bill Hobbib

Here at ExaGrid, we are very concerned about all who have been affected by Hurricane Sandy. Our thoughts and sympathies are with the families of the 61 people who have died as a result of the storm, including 22 New York City deaths. 6.5 million businesses and homes have been left without power, and the property damage and lost business could cost as much as $60 billion.

On a personal level, my parents in New Jersey are among the 2 million homes and businesses who are currently without power.  They describe the damage as “devastating.”   The most recent projection of when they will have power restored is November 11. Emergency crews are working around the clock to restore power–let’s hope it’s sooner than November 11 for them and all others in the region affected.

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Survey of 1,200 IT Managers Reveals Widespread Dissatisfaction with State of Backup

Posted on October 18, 2012 by Bill Hobbib

We recently announced the results of a survey of 1,200 IT managers which revealed very interesting findings–widespread dissatisfaction with the capabilities of many existing backup systems to keep pace with requirements for faster backups, more robust disaster recovery, improved virtual server backup and recovery, and lower backup system costs.

The dissatisfaction stems largely from the reality that many IT organizations have delayed investments in modernizing backup systems in recent years. This leaves existing backup systems  unable to protect growing amounts of critical data. The survey was conducted on ExaGrid’s behalf by IDG Research Services.

To learn more about the survey results, download the free whitepaper, titled “Wanted: Better Backup.”

Nearly 40% of IT managers report that their routine nightly backups exceed the backup window, with 30 percent saying their companies exceed the backup window by more than four hours. Many IT managers report that legacy backup systems are inadequate to meet business imperatives for low total cost of ownership (TCO), seamless scalability, ease of administration and management and WAN-efficient replication. The survey also found that use of tape-based systems is expected to decline as IT departments move to modernize their backup infrastructures, with increased investments in disk-based systems.

The survey revealed several important trends and perceptions about existing backup systems:

  • Backup challenges mounting – Among the top nightly backup challenges cited by IT managers are the following:
    • 54 percent said that their backup windows are taking too long
    • 51 percent said they are facing growing business requirements for more reliable and efficient disaster recovery
    • 48 percent said they face long restore and recovery times
  • Widening expectations gap – There is a growing gap between what outdated backup systems can achieve and even greater requirements for faster backup and recovery that come with explosive data growth:
    • While 75% of respondents said low TCO was extremely important or very important, only 45% said their systems delivered this effectively. In addition, 72% said avoiding costly “forklift upgrades” and product obsolescence was either extremely important or very important, but just 41% said their current systems were able to deliver this.
  • Protecting virtualized servers – Existing backup solutions need improvement to meet goals for protecting virtualized servers:
    • Just 44% of respondents said their current backup system either meets or exceeds their offsite disaster recovery goals for virtualized servers. In addition, only roughly half said their systems are meeting goals for protecting virtualized servers with regard to backup windows and restore/recovery times.
  • Data is vulnerable –IT managers have major concerns with the capabilities of their backup systems to keep their data secure:
    • The vast majority of IT managers (97 percent) believe that their data is somewhat or extremely vulnerable to data protection or security incidents, and most have experienced one or more of these incidents in the past year.
    • Following a data protection incident, it takes an average of about seven hours to resume normal operations. IDC estimates that it costs businesses an average of $70,000 per hour of downtime, further highlighting the need for enhanced backup and recovery.

  • Disk investment increasing – IT managers are interested in disk-based backup solutions with deduplication in a grid architecture, citing the advantages of faster backups, reduced management burden, no expanding backup windows as data grows, avoidance of forklift upgrades and elimination of potential unexpected costs over time:
      • Among respondents using tape only, 75 percent said they expect to be using a disk-based method within 12 months.
      • Usage of disk-based data deduplication appliances is expected to increase by 48 percent among respondents using tape only.

    To read more details of the survey results, get the free report, “Wanted: Better Backup. Poll shows widening gap between
    expectations and reality    .”

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ExaGrid Penetrates 50 EMC Data Domain Accounts

Posted on September 16, 2012 by Bill Hobbib

This past week, ExaGrid announced that 50 companies and organizations previously using EMC Data Domain have selected ExaGrid’s disk backup with deduplication to either replace their Data Domain system or to handle new growth and projects where they needed more cost-effective scalability. The reality is that as their data grows, many EMC Data Domain customers experience the challenges and high ongoing costs specific to the EMC Data Domain front-end controller “scale up” architecture. These problems are solved by ExaGrid’s “scale out” GRID architecture and unique approach to disk backup scalability.

With solutions that have a first generation scale up architecture using a front controller with disk shelves such as Data Domain, organizations must add disk shelves as data grows, which means backup windows expand because there are not more deduplication processing resources added to support the increased workload, only more disk. Eventually, backup windows grow to the point where the front-end controller can no longer support the workload and must be replaced with a more powerful controller through a costly forklift upgrade.

In contrast, ExaGrid’s next generation scale out GRID architecture adds full servers – including memory, processor, disk, and bandwidth – to maintain consistently fast backup performance and a fixed length backup window as data increases. Customers can confidently purchase a system that will scale to handle future data growth, keep the backup window from expanding and avoid costly forklift upgrades associated with the front-end server/disk shelf architecture. In many system configurations, ExaGrid disk backup with deduplication is about 50% the cost of EMC Data Domain in system and maintenance costs over a 3-year period.

Among the 50 organizations that have either replaced their Data Domain system with ExaGrid or have added ExaGrid’s appliance to an existing backup environment still using Data Domain, are the following companies:

  • Bollinger Inc.: The 22nd largest insurance broker in the U.S. had been backing up its data with an EMC Data Domain solution. The company needed to be able to retain 12 weeks of data for disaster recovery, but could only keep two weeks of data on its system. Realizing that expansion of the Data Domain system would be cost prohibitive, Bollinger decided to install two ExaGrid systems to back up its data. The company achieved superior data deduplication ratios and offsite replication performance with the ExaGrid system, and ExaGrid’s scalable approach ensures that Bollinger can meet its backup needs without costly forklift upgrades in the future.

    Tom Godon, Assistant Vice President and Network Engineer for Bollinger Inc. said “Retention was a major issue for us, and when we realized we would need to add more disk to our Data Domain system, we decided to look for alternatives. The ExaGrid system was about half the cost of a new, comparable EMC Data Domain system. In addition to the improved retention and better transmission speeds between sites, the ExaGrid system is easy to maintain and has a user-friendly interface compared to the more complex UI of the Data Domain system. With the ExaGrid’s scalability, our backup needs are met for the foreseeable future.”

     

  • Greenwich Central School District: The storage needs of the school district outgrew its existing Data Domain system, and the IT team could only achieve five to seven days of data retention. After replacing the Data Domain system with ExaGrid, the IT team saw deduplication ratios as high as 40:1, and increased its retention to about 25 days.

    Bill Hillebrandt, Network Analyst and Director of Information Technology” said, “For what I was going to pay for getting one Dell or EMC device, I’ll be able to buy two of the ExaGrid systems. I’ll be able to accomplish my offsite storage as well as my local storage for the cost of what it would have been for a single Dell EqualLogic box.“

  • RFI Communications and Security Systems: The IT team at RFI was backing up data to a Data Domain unit, but when data grew to the point where it required an expansion of the system, the company was facing a costly “forklift upgrade.” Instead, RFI replaced the Data Domain system with ExaGrid, reaching deduplication ratios of as much as 63:1. In addition, the system can scale as data grows.

    Frank Jennings, Network Administrator for RFI said, “Unlike the Data Domain system, ExaGrid’s solution gives us the ability to easily scale out the system up as our data grows.  We liked the fact that the ExaGrid holds our most current data in a complete form for faster recovery. With the Data Domain system, the data was deduplicated immediately and our backups and restores took longer. The ExaGrid system is extremely scalable and flexible, and it’s a solution that should serve us well into the future, including the addition of a second system offsite for data replication.”

We are glad to see that customers are seeing the value of ExaGrid’s next generation scale up architecture.  If you would like to see how ExaGrid can save you up to 50% vs EMC Data Domain over 3 years, click the link below.

Request Budgetary Pricing

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Disaster Recovery Planning: Can Your Data Survive a Disaster?

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Bill Hobbib

Can your data survive a disaster?
With the news of Hurricane Isaac hitting, many IT departments are taking another look at their disaster recovery plans.  Disasters can happen at any time and to anyone.  They can come in the form of a natural disaster such as a hurricane, tornado, flood or they can be of other types such as fire, theft, power outage, virus attack, internal water leak, etc.

While your disaster recovery plan should cover the protection of your hardware, applications and your data, your data is typically the most valuable asset for any organization because without it, most companies would be out of business.  In today’s age, most of this data is stored on file-servers or in virtual machines in the form of Exchange, SQL and application created data or regular file-system files. So all your data should be backed up regularly with a disaster recovery and backup plan that meets your company’s requirements.  Remember you are backing up your data in the event you need to recover from it, so always consider the recovery time when developing your data backup strategy.

How does an IT organization plan and ensure that all of its data is protected in the event of a disaster?

Disaster recovery planning of your data should take into account the following:

All data should be backed up to a reliable backup target.  When backing up your data, make sure it is segmented so during the restore process you will be able to quickly restore your most critical data first.  Your primary goal is to get your business up and running at some level even in a degraded mode while other systems are brought back on line.  When planning the order of restoration, understand what basic infrastructure must be in place first before bringing the first critical business systems online.  All critical data should be backed up to a reliable backup target. When choosing the backup target device, make sure you choose something that is good for your everyday business and disaster recovery scenarios.  Disk-based backup appliances are good targets as they provide rapid data recovery for both files and system restorations.  Disk-based backup appliances with deduplication also provide the advantage to perform rapid restores of older data without the need to go offsite to retrieve a tape.

At a minimum, a copy of all critical data must be kept offsite.  There must be a reliable strategy to get data backups offsite; in this manner you will have data onsite when needed for most restores and offsite in the event of a disaster to your primary or production site.  When choosing the offsite location, your goal is to bring your business back up to a running order in the shortest time.  One advantage of using a disk-based deduplication appliance with replication is the data will automatically get replicated to the remote site once the backup is complete on the primary site.  The only limitation is the bandwidth of the link between the sites.  Since the data is deduplicated, often with a ratio of 50:1, only 20 GB will need to be transferred per 1 TB of data that is backed up.

An emergency list of all necessary personnel and managers must be available along with multiple contact numbers.

Test your disaster recovery plan periodically. Your complete data disaster recovery plan should be reviewed a minimum of every year since your business and systems are constantly changing.  Periodically you should test your plan and at least verify sections of the data recovery to verify you can get your operations up and running. These tests must be thorough enough to ensure that the backups are good, your data can be recovered and your systems can become operational.   The best test would be to take a weekend day and try to get your operations back up and operational within some number of hours.  This may be 8 hours or 36 hours.  You must decide what is good enough for your business as most availability varies with cost.

Ensure you have a support contract with your key appliance, system and application vendors so they can assist you in the event of a disaster.  Make sure you understand their capabilities to assist during a disaster.

Comply with regulations at your disaster recovery site.  While you are operating from your disaster recovery site, you still should comply with any regulations and keep with your current data backup plan.  Many disk-based appliances will have the capability to just continue as you were with your primary site.

Update the disaster recovery plan regularly.  Since your environment and data is changing every day and there will always be new threats, you must constantly be updating your procedures to keep the disaster recovery plan ready.

With the proper disaster recovery planning, you should be able to reduce your company’s overall risk.  Remember, to test the plan regularly and make sure it continues to meet the goals for your company.

ExaGrid provides a disk backup with data deduplication system which enables fast offsite DR. An excellent example of an ExaGrid customer using these DR capabilities is The Coastal Bank. They credit receipt of the highest Possible FDIC regulatory rating of “1” in part to use of ExaGrid’s disk-based backup system. In The Coastal Bank case study, they describe how restores that previously took an hour or more–and much longer if restoring from an offsite storage location–are accomplished in as fast as 5 minutes.

If you are interested in budgetary pricing on how ExaGrid disk backup with deduplication can help you get more efficient, reliable disaster recovery, click the link below.

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TSM Users Free up Expensive Primary Disk

Posted on August 22, 2012 by mdelfeld

In a traditional IBM Tivoli Storage Manager environment, the TSM server sends backup data to a “primary disk pool,” usually composed of primary disk that is used for staging backup data. Backup data is then migrated daily to a “primary storage pool,” traditionally a tape library.

When you install an ExaGrid system in an IBM TSM environment, you no longer need to manage a separate primary disk pool as a staging area from which to copy daily TSM backups, since the ExaGrid system effectively acts as both the primary disk pool and the primary storage pool. This can allow you to free up the relatively expensive primary disk resources that you were using as your primary disk pool, and reclaim them for your primary storage needs.

Click here to read more about ExaGrid’s support of TSM and our IBM Tivoli certification.

If you would like to learn how you can achieve cost savings in disk backup with deduplication, download our complimentary white paper now.

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