Impressive POC gives Herrfors Confidence in ExaGrid

The IT staff at Herrfors had been backing up the company’s data to NAS storage using Veeam, and as the NAS storage reached its end of life, the IT staff decided to investigate other backup storage solutions, particularly one that integrates well with Veeam.

“I first heard of ExaGrid when I met their team at a Veeam event in 2016 in Helsinki, and I thought to myself that I should keep ExaGrid in mind the next time that we needed backup storage,” said Sebastian Storholm, IT Infrastructure Manager at Herrfors. “Years later, when we did need a new solution, we looked at different products on the market but decided on ExaGrid due its integration with Veeam, because it offered the best pricing and best performance, and also because ExaGrid stands by its product. It’s one thing to trust a vendor, but it’s another thing for a vendor to guarantee the performance that they advertise and that was refreshing.”

Storholm had a proof-of-concept (POC) with ExaGrid and was impressed with the Tiered Backup Storage, and with how easy the POC process was. “Trying to get a POC with bigger vendors can be difficult as that isn’t something they are very interested in doing. The ExaGrid team actually suggested doing a POC first and said they wanted us to be happy with the product before we actually finalized any deals,” he said.

Storholm found that the installation process was quick and simple. “It was amazing! ExaGrid shipped us the appliance and we installed it into the rack and connected it. Then we got on a phone call from our ExaGrid support engineer, and we got our ExaGrid system completely up and running and integrated with Veeam in under three hours,” said Storholm.

The ExaGrid system is easy to install and use and works seamlessly with all of the most frequently used backup applications, so an organization can retain its investment in existing applications and processes.

ExaGrid Support and Scalability Key to Long-Term Planning

Storholm appreciates ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture and the fact that ExaGrid supports its appliances with no end-of-life or planned obsolescence. “One of the common trends in the backup storage industry that annoys me is when you buy a product and then three years later you want to extend it with additional drives, and then vendors often will say that the product has reached the end of its life and we need to upgrade to a newer version of the product. I wanted a backup storage solution that I don’t need to relearn every three years; I wanted something that we can run and maintain for a decade and ExaGrid’s scalability and support of its product was a major factor with installing it in our IT environment,” he said.

ExaGrid’s award-winning scale-out architecture provides customers with a fixed-length backup window regardless of data growth. Its unique disk-cache Landing Zone allows for the fastest backups and retains the most recent backup in its full undeduplicated form, enabling the fastest restores. ExaGrid’s appliance models can be mixed and matched into a single scale-out system allowing a full backup of up to 2.7PB with a combined ingest rate of 488TB/hr, in a single system. The appliances automatically join the scale-out system. Each appliance includes the appropriate amount of processor, memory, disk, and bandwidth for the data size. By adding compute with capacity, the backup window remains fixed in length as the data grows. Automatic load balancing across all repositories allows for full utilization of all appliances. Data is deduplicated into an offline repository, and additionally, data is globally deduplicated across all repositories.

This combination of capabilities in a turnkey appliance makes the ExaGrid system easy to install, manage, and scale. ExaGrid’s architecture provides lifetime value and investment protection that no other architecture can match.