The less you need to think about backup, the better. But in order to slough off the burden of backup worries to focus on other IT priorities, you need deep and abiding trust in your backup solution. What does that look like?
The ideal backup solution is easy to set up and to use even without specialized technical knowledge. It should also have impeccable security capabilities, offer fast backup and fast recovery, be seamlessly integrated with your data recovery solution of choice, provide cost-savings, and scale without performance degradation.
Veeam partners with dozens of key storage vendors to help you find the backup storage solution that best meets your specific business needs. One of our long-term storage partners, ExaGrid, offers scalable and secured tiered backup storage that seamlessly integrates with Veeam to simplify backup management with scalability, security, and ransomware recovery at an affordable cost.
Today, we want to share a few facts about how Veeam and ExaGrid work together to deliver benefits in five key areas:
1.Deployment. Both Veeam and ExaGrid offer ease of deployment with trial opportunities, universal licensing, and automation tools. Veeam offers a free trial and three package levels so companies can choose the service level that fits their needs the best. ExaGrid offers a proof-of-concept trial, with no paperwork or commitment to test. They also ship a backup appliance that can be set up in just a few hours with an assigned ExaGrid support engineer, who is an expert in both ExaGrid and Veeam technology.
2. Performance. ExaGrid focuses solely on backup and designs its appliances for optimal backup and restore performance, handling even large, enterprise levels of data without performance degradation. For example, ExaGrid uses the Veeam Enhanced Data Mover (EDM), a more advanced and secure protocol that results in 20% to 30% faster ingestion than common open standards like NFS or CIFS. ExaGrid then writes backups directly to a disk-cache Landing Zone, thereby avoiding inline processing and ensuring the highest possible backup performance, which results in the shortest backup window. Adaptive Deduplication performs deduplication in parallel with backups for a strong recovery point.
3. Security and recovery. For quick recovery from data loss, it’s critical to be able to know that your backup data is clean and uncompromised. On the software side, Veeam provides multilayer protection with inline malware detection during backup with, SIEM integration, immutability for all backups on-premises or in the cloud, zero trust security, and end-to-end encryption. ExaGrid’s architecture includes a front-end Landing Zone for recent operational data and a Repository Tier where the most recent backups and longer-term retention are stored as immutable data objects.
The Repository Tier is non-network-facing and hidden from threat actors. The Landing Zone data can be recovered by Veeam in seconds, whether it’s accidentally deleted or overwritten, corrupted, or encrypted by ransomware. The air-gapped Repository Tier is further protected by delayed deletion from ExaGrid’s Retention Time-Lock technology, so that nothing is actually immediately deleted. You can then “stop the clock” and use point in time recovery to restore your critical data.
4. Scaling. Veeam offers the ultimate flexibility with 100% software-defined and hardware-agnostic data protection. This means that wherever you store your data and however your data grows, Veeam can protect it. The ExaGrid system can easily scale to accommodate data growth as well. ExaGrid’s software makes the system highly scalable and appliances of any size or age can be mixed and matched in a single system. A single scale-out system can take in full backup up to a 6PB plus retention at an ingest rate of up to 516TB per hour.
ExaGrid also supports Veeam’s Scale-out Backup Repository (SOBR). This allows backup administrators using Veeam to direct all jobs to a single repository made up of ExaGrid appliances in a single scale-out system and automating backup job management. ExaGrid’s support of SOBR also automates the addition of appliances into an existing ExaGrid system. This means that as data grows, administrators can simply add new appliances to a Veeam repository group.
5. Cost and time savings. With standardized data protection across cloud, virtual, and physical environments, Veeam eliminates the cost and complexity of having multiple point products. Veeam also cuts downtime from data loss dramatically, putting your business back on track in minutes, not days or weeks. All of this adds up to as much as a 329% three-year ROI and $1.1 million average cost savings.
You’re also free to use the backup solution that best fits your budget and needs. If you choose to use ExaGrid, it can help save on costs with the aforementioned lack of planned obsolescence and by enhancing Veeam’s deduplication and dedupe-friendly compression capabilities. This reduces the storage required and saves on storage costs up front and over time, which is particularly useful for companies that must retain years of data for regulatory or legal purposes. ExaGrid also offers five-year price protection: Whatever you pay for an appliance up front is your price for additional appliances for the next five years. With this scale-out approach, you can buy what you need when you need it, knowing the price stays fixed.
To sum up these capabilities, ExaGrid solely focuses on backup with appliances engineered for security, performance, and streamlined deployment with advanced Veeam integrations that are built in. After over 14 years, the partnership between Veeam and ExaGrid continues to evolve. Just recently, we announced that ExaGrid can be an S3 Object Store target for Veeam and has the capability to support Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 using S3 directly to ExaGrid. We’re excited to see what comes next!
Learn more about ExaGrid and Veeam, or contact ExaGrid to start a proof-of-concept trial.