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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Loretto Pairs Veeam with ExaGrid, Removes Backup Bottlenecks

Customer Overview

Loretto is a continuing healthcare organization that has spent the past 90 years providing a variety of services for older adults throughout Central New York. The non-profit organization was first formed in 1926, with the vision to transform elder care by deinstitutionalizing nursing homes and long-term care services and replacing them with home-like settings utilizing person-first care. Today, Loretto is made up of 2,500 dedicated employees and offers 19 specialized programs throughout Onondaga and Cayuga Counties.

Key Benefits:

  • Scalability ensures that Loretto can keep pace with data growth while preserving its investment in the initial system – particularly important for a budget conscious nonprofit
  • Integration with Veeam simplifies backup process, maximizes data deduplication, increases retention
  • Restores and recoveries are easier and ‘much less painful’
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Bottlenecks Due to Tape Drive Backup Initiative

Prior to installing ExaGrid, Loretto had been backing up to tape, but constant bottlenecks due to lengthy backup jobs – along with increasing data volumes – were making it more difficult to continue using tape.

“We consistently had failed backup jobs because of an aged tape library. It was normal for backup jobs to start Saturday morning and complete mid-Monday due to limitations of our current technology,” said Brandon Claps, IT Infrastructure Manager at Loretto.

From the very beginning, it was clear to Claps, who has been with Loretto for eight years, that the company was in dire need of a new approach. “It got to the point where we were expanding our business, becoming more and more electronic, and it just wasn’t feasible to have our backups and our contingency plans remain on the wayside. We made it a corporate initiative to make our backup strategy more robust.”

"With Veeam and ExaGrid, I can restore a virtual machine in as little as 15 minutes, or I can do an instant recovery in even less time. The whole process is a thousand times less painful than before; there is no digging through tapes to find the right one. I just pull it up, restore it, and I’m on my way. "

Brandon Claps,IT Infrastructure Manager

Pay-as-You-Grow Scalability Provides Budget-Conscious Non- Profit with Risk-Free Decision

After evaluating a number of backup applications and hardware appliances, Loretto went forward with the combination of Veeam’s virtual server data protection and ExaGrid’s disk-based backup with data deduplication solution. Loretto implemented a two-site ExaGrid system with the primary site appliance performing backups at company headquarters and the offsite ExaGrid appliance for disaster recovery.

“The deciding factors in our choice to pair Veeam with ExaGrid were cost, direct integration with Veeam, and scalability,” said Claps. “Being a nonprofit, cost is self-explanatory as it’s not always easy to get funding for new projects. Scalability was important because in the past, we wanted to make sure that as we continued to grow, our system had the ability to grow with us.”

The combination of ExaGrid and Veeam deduplication has simplified the backup process for Claps and his team. “Switching to the ExaGrid and Veeam solution has really allowed us to store more backups and multiple copies of our backups for a longer period of time than when we were backing up to straight tape, and having a 10GbE connection with the ExaGrid system has greatly helped to reduce our backup window,” said Claps.

Scale-out Architecture with Load Balancing Ensures Consistent Performance

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.

New Backup/Restore Process is a ‘Thousand Times Less Painful’

In addition to the shorter backup window, Loretto is seeing faster restores using the ExaGrid system. “With Veeam and ExaGrid, I can restore a virtual machine in as little as 15 minutes, or I can do an instant recovery in even less time. The whole process is a thousand times less painful than before; there is no digging through tapes to find the right one. I just pull it up, restore it, and I’m on my way.”

Customer Support

The ExaGrid system was designed to be easy to set up and operate. ExaGrid’s industry-leading level 2 senior support engineers are assigned to individual customers, ensuring they always work with the same engineer. Customers never have to repeat themselves to various support staff, and issues get resolved quickly.

Easy to Install and Maintain

The ExaGrid system is easy to install and use and works seamlessly with the industry’s leading backup applications so that an organization can retain its investment in its existing backup applications and processes. In addition, ExaGrid appliances can replicate to a second ExaGrid appliance at a second site or to the public cloud for DR (disaster recovery).

ExaGrid and Veeam

Veeam’s backup solutions and ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage combine for the industry’s fastest backups, fastest restores, a scale-out storage system as data grows, and a strong ransomware recovery story – all at the lowest cost.

ExaGrid-Veeam Combined Dedupe

Veeam uses changed block tracking to perform a level of data deduplication. ExaGrid allows Veeam deduplication and Veeam dedupe-friendly compression to stay on. ExaGrid will increase Veeam’s deduplication by a factor of about 7:1 to a total combined deduplication ratio of 14:1, reducing the storage required and saving on storage costs up front and over time.

About ExaGrid

ExaGrid provides Tiered Backup Storage with a unique disk-cache Landing Zone that enables fastest backups and restores, a Repository Tier that offers the lowest cost for long-term retention and enables ransomware recovery, and scale-out architecture which includes full appliances with up to 6PB full backup in a single system.

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