Short story

We have decided to change our backup appliance to ExaGrid solution. Why, I will explain it.

End of the 2017 we we changed from Networker backup sofware to Veeam Backup & Repliaction. Our environment is 100% virtualized by VMware vSphere. Restore test were part of the Powerpuff (… save the day… :)) project. We realized restore process, especially Instant VM recovery feature was very slow. One normal sized VM can’t start under 15 minutes. Reason of the slow restore was rehydration deduped data.

We didn’t want to lose this great feature becouse of our backup appliance, especially our purpose with the Veeam was made faster our restore process. We want to restore whole VM or service (multiple VMs) minutes, not hours like previously solution.

We have started calculate maintenance fee and compire it with new Dell EMC DataDomain and ExaGrid. Fee of 3Y support of Dell EMC 2500 we can buy a new Dell EMC DD 3300. It’s looks like a good deal, but when we dive into technical details realize that DD3300 has capacity limit. The next size from DataDomain is 6300 schould be oversized, and over our budget. We calculated EX13000E is pass our DR environment. It was necessary becouse of size of landing zone. We calculated 5Y TCO and ExaGrid price was lower than competitors.

We have wrote to ExaGrid and they helped us sizeing, and chooese the right equipment. Fortunately they said EX13000E. The ExaGrid approach: store your last week backups on Landing Zone, witch is a non deduplicated area. If you have to fast restore, you want it from latest data, and you can it thanks Landing zone.

I would like highlited some interesting capability:

• Landing zone of course
• Scale out architecture: if you add node to your cluster, your throughput will extend
• Every node is a controller too
• Grow at easy, just add any type of node to your grid
• Global deduplication amongs nodes
• Integrated Veeam Data mover (More: http://www.exagrid.com/wp-content/uploads/ExaGrid-Veeam-End-to-End-Backup-Storage-Data-Sheet.pdf)
• DR: I recommend to you use ExaGrid on your Primary and DR site to repliaction too. Otherwise your replicated data will rewrite your data in landing zone. Eg.: if you use Veeam replication, your data will landing on landing zone. If you replicated data among nodes, data are going to store retention repository

Veeam Backup & Replication Enterprise Plus is recommanded to ExaGrid. Scale-out Backup Repository with unlimited repository supported only Ent. Plus licenc.

Details: https://www.veeam.com/veeam_availability_suite_9_5_editions_comparison_ds.pdf

You can reach ExaGrid’s data sheet on this link: http://www.exagrid.com/wp-content/uploads/ExaGrid-Product-Overview-Data-Sheet.pdf 

Hardware:

It is brilliant. Normal Supermicro server with Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDDs. CPU and memroy depends on you choose. 1G network is default but you can add optional 10G network too. The magic happen in the Software! 🙂 It is a customized Debian base linux.

Full specification: http://www.exagrid.com/wp-content/uploads/ExaGrid-Technical-Specifications-Data-Sheet.pdf

Pictures from installation day

After 2 weeks our order the magix box was arrived at our DR site.

EXAGRID EX13000E box

The guys from CZ (Distributor of ExaGrid) put it into rack.

Cabling, Power On and set up IPs, add mail server…

The installation process was 2 hours only. Engineer from ExaGrid checked the setups remotely, fix NTP and some config. Next day we add it to our Veeam environment.

I really proud of Hungary first ExaGrid installation! 🙂