Hitachi Consulting Acquires Six ExaGrid D2D Backup Systems With Dedup

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. announced that Hitachi Consulting has chosen the ExaGrid system to achieve faster backups and restores, and reduce the hassles of tape backup.

Hitachi Consulting is the global business and IT consulting company of Hitachi Ltd., and a widely recognized leader in delivering practical, value-based business strategies and technology solutions. Hitachi Consulting’s client base includes 25 percent of the Global 100, as well as many leading mid-market companies. Based in Dallas, Texas, Hitachi Consulting has offices in North America, Europe and Asia.

The company chose ExaGrid to work with its backup application, Symantec’s Veritas NetBackup after evaluating several competing solutions. The firm purchased a total of six ExaGrid systems for primary site backup and for disaster recovery from an offsite location. Three systems are located at Hitachi Consulting’s data center in Dallas, and backup data is replicated to the other three systems located at another Hitachi Consulting office in Addison, Texas.

“The ExaGrid system was much more cost-effective than the other solutions and it integrated nicely with NetBackup,” said Bradford Leonard, Network Engineer at Hitachi Consulting. “Because the ExaGrid system performs data de-duplication post-process, we knew that we could just dump our data onto the disk and then the ExaGrid would de-duplicate the data behind the scenes. Post-process data de-duplication also makes our backups run faster than on-the-fly, in-line approaches. Our nightly backups have been reduced from 12 hours to just 3 hours.”

ExaGrid uses byte-level data de-duplication, which stores only the byte-level changes from backup to backup instead of storing full file copies. This unique approach reduces the disk space required by a range of 10:1 to 50:1 or more, delivering unparalleled cost savings and performance. ExaGrid delivers extremely fast backup performance because data is written directly to high-speed disk, and data de-duplication is performed post-process after the data is backed up.

Hitachi Consulting found several advantages when using the combination of NetBackup and ExaGrid instead of tape. In particular, the firm was able to realize cost savings on licenses and maintenance fees, and was able to be more flexible with its procedures to maximize the efficiency of its backups and improve data retention and restoration.

“Organizations struggle daily with tape backup technology that simply can’t keep pace with growing data protection needs,” said Bill Andrews, president and CEO of ExaGrid Systems, Inc. “The ExaGrid Disk-based Backup system was designed to work with existing backup applications to quickly, easily and cost-effectively reduce long backup windows and eliminate the hassles of tape.”