Canadian Company Switches to ExaGrid to Increase Data Protection and Optimize Environment

Marlborough, Mass., February 19, 2019 – ExaGrid®, a leading provider of intelligent hyperconverged storage for backup, today announced that Ahearn & Soper has optimized and further protected its backup environment by establishing offsite replication using ExaGrid hyperconverged backup with data deduplication, and has been able to match its data growth due to ExaGrid’s scalable architecture.

Ahearn & Soper Inc. provides barcode software and hardware solutions that improve accuracy, tracking, and efficiency within distribution, manufacturing, and healthcare operations. The company is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, and operates across North America from branch sales and service offices.

Ahearn & Soper decided to add disaster recovery (DR) to its backup environment and wanted a solution that provided offsite replication. “ExaGrid came to our site and explained how the system worked and the benefits of its architecture. We were quite impressed with the product because of the self-contained nature of the system and how it handles deduplication and replication offsite,” said William Rosenblath, IT manager and systems engineer at Ahearn & Soper. “ExaGrid’s data deduplication has enabled us to retain more data and keep older recovery points—some that go back up to two years—where we could only store a few months’ worth with our previous system.”

As Ahearn & Soper’s data has grown, Rosenblath worked with his ExaGrid support engineer to scale the existing ExaGrid systems. “Our data has doubled in size since we first installed our ExaGrid systems, so we purchased additional appliances. Our support engineer guided us through the installation of the new appliances from the upgrade process to transferring data to the new system. Last year, we had issues with upgrading our older appliance to the latest version of the firmware. We had two appliances at our DR site, but only one at our primary site and this was complicating the issue. ExaGrid swapped out the two appliances at the DR site for one appliance that matched our primary site appliance, at no cost to us. ExaGrid stands behind their product very well and provides excellent technical support when issues do arise,” said Rosenblath.

In addition to increasing data protection through expanded retention and offsite replication, ExaGrid’s disk-based backup has fit into Ahearn & Soper’s plan to virtualize its environment for greater efficiency. “Since moving to ExaGrid, we’ve transitioned to a VMware system and virtualized our data center. We upgraded Arcserve to back up VMware, and now we’re backing up system images instead of files. Our ExaGrid system deduplicates those images and replicates them offsite, so we have full system images that we can restore from. After improving our networking and our data center systems, the efficiency has gone up tenfold. We used to have a goal of just getting our daily incrementals done overnight, and now they’re usually completed within an hour or two,” said Rosenblath. “Switching to ExaGrid has saved us so much time on backup management. It’s almost a ‘set it and forget it’ type of model, so all we need to do is monitor it and make sure that everything is working,” he added.

Read the complete Ahearn & Soper customer success story to learn more about the company’s experience using ExaGrid.

ExaGrid’s published customer success stories and enterprise stories number over 360, more than all other vendors in the space combined. These stories demonstrate how satisfied customers are with ExaGrid’s unique architectural approach, differentiated product, and unrivalled customer support. Customers consistently state that not only is the product best-in-class, but ‘it just works.’

About ExaGrid

ExaGrid provides intelligent hyperconverged storage for backup with data deduplication, a unique landing zone, and scale-out architecture. ExaGrid’s landing zone provides for the fastest backups, restores, and instant VM recoveries. Its scale-out architecture includes full appliances in a scale-out system and ensures a fixed-length backup window as data grows, eliminating expensive forklift upgrades. Visit us at exagrid.com or connect with us on LinkedIn. See what our customers have to say about their own ExaGrid experiences and why they now spend significantly less time on backup.

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