Quest and ExaGrid Team

As IT departments large and small grapple with the need to lower costs while operating more efficiently, trends like data growth, shrinking VMware backup windows, RTOs, and the need for disaster recovery make it increasingly difficult for companies to ensure their virtual infrastructure is protected.

As a result, a number of customers now turn to the combination of Quest Software, Inc. and ExaGrid Systems, Inc. to deliver optimized virtual data protection. Using Quest vRanger in tandem with ExaGrid’s disk backup appliance provides customers with a highly efficient, disk-based backup solution tailored to meet the specific needs of VMware virtual environments.

Lee County Tax Collector Turns to Quest and ExaGrid
To protect its growing VMware environment, which makes up 70 percent of the organization’s IT infrastructure and consists of 6 ESXi hosts running on vSphere 5, the Lee County Tax Collector’s Office realized it needed to modernize its backup and recovery strategy. The Office chose the combination of vRanger and ExaGrid to replace its tape library system.

Using vRanger in tandem with ExaGrid has provided the Lee County Tax Collector with a way to backup and restore critical VMware virtual machines, and instantly replicate data to an offsite location, all while saving up to an hour of IT staff time each day, by eliminating the time-consuming process associated with manual tape backups.

Additional customers now leveraging vRanger in concert with ExaGrid include ABC Companies in Winter Garden, FL.; Capital G Bank Limited in Bermuda; First State Bank in St. Clair Shores, MI; and Monroe Plan in Rochester, NY.

Disk-Based Backup with Deduplication
for Virtual Environments
The combination of vRanger and ExaGrid appliances delivers a disk-based backup solution with data deduplication that’s for virtual environments, enabling customers to combat data growth, reduce their storage footprints, and ensure the rapid restore of critical VMware data.

vRanger recognizes ExaGrid appliances as disk targets, meaning backups are automatically stored on the system. This tested and validated solution delivers a significant reduction in disk space requirements.

vRanger features a patented Active Block Mapping (ABM) technology which scans block maps to backup only changed blocks with active data. Combined with support for VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT), this reduces the amount of data transferred to the ExaGrid appliance, which then further reduces the backup size by up to 50-to-1 with its patented zone-level data deduplication process.

Deploying vRanger in tandem with ExaGrid enables both image-level and file-level restores, and the native catalog in vRanger makes it to conduct granular recoveries. In addition, the joint solution allows customers to copy vRanger backups offsite by way of the ExaGrid appliance, and enables recoveries over the WAN in the event of a disaster.

Ron Joray, network administrator, Lee County Tax Collector, said: "The combination of vRanger and ExaGrid delivers exactly what we need to ensure reliable protection of our growing virtual environment. The two products work together seamlessly, with almost no intervention required from the IT staff. We’ve been able to save both time and money, and the service we’ve received from both companies has been top notch."

Walter Angerer, senior VP and GM, data protection, Quest Software, said: "As they confront the many challenges associated with ensuring fast, reliable protection for their VMware data, customers are actively looking for best-of-breed technologies designed with the specific needs of the virtual environment in mind. Pairing our VMware Ready certified vRanger technology with ExaGrid’s leading-edge appliances enables customers to meet their challenges head on, and confidently grow their virtual infrastructures."

Marc Crespi, VP product management, ExaGrid Systems, said: "As virtual infrastructures continue to grow in 2012 and budgets continue to tighten, partnerships between leading companies become even more important. Pairing the ExaGrid disk backup system with vRanger has given our customers the rock solid foundation they need in order to expand and protect their number of VMs. The ExaGrid integration with vRanger directly addresses our customers’ needs by providing fast, scalable and cost-effective backups with deduplication for VMware environments. ExaGrid’s unique performance-based GRID architecture is the only approach that scales with full servers, adding both compute power and capacity, resulting in the shortest backup window that does not expand as your data grows, all while eliminating forklift upgrades and product obsolescence."