T&E Management Firm Concur Selects ExaGrid

ExaGrid Systems, Inc., announced that an
increasing number of companies with large data sizes and demanding backup
requirements are turning to ExaGrid for faster backups and restores and scalability to maintain a fixed length backup window as data grows.

Concur Technologies, Inc., a travel and expense management solutions provider,
stores over 2.5PB of data on their ExaGrid system and is among a growing number
of ExaGrid customers with large amounts of data whose backup needs outstripped
the capabilities of their former backup solutions.

Trusted by more than 15,000
organizations and used by over 18 million people in countries around the world
– including 6 of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies, Concur’s on-demand services
annually process more than 50 million travel and expense (T&E) transactions.

Companies with large data volumes and high data growth like Concur
are choosing ExaGrid’s disk backup with deduplication to meet their backup and
recovery needs in large part because of GRID architecture, which
provides scalability by adding servers in a grid as data expands.
With other disk backup solutions that have a front-end server architecture and
add just disk shelves as data grows, the backup windows expand over time to a
point where the front-end server must be replaced with a more powerful server
via a costly ‘forklift upgrade.’ Scalable
GRID-based approach adds full servers-including memory, processor, disk,
and bandwidth – maintains a fixed length backup window as data increases with no
forklift upgrades or product obsolescence.

Before ExaGrid, Concur faced multiple challenges
with its
backup infrastructure:

• Concur was using a
  disk-based backup device with a single controller, which could grow in storage
  capacity, but not processing power.
• According to Sean Graver,
  storage architect for Concur, the device became overwhelmed by backup
  requirements and was not scalable. Restores were often difficult because the
  data deduplication process took too long.
• Over time, the data volume
  exceeded the capacity of the system, and Concur was faced with having to
  replace the existing system and essentially start over again, or implement a
  new solution.

It needed a solution that would not only meet their backup
requirements today, but would also scale to handle more data without increasing
the backup window as the company’s data volume continues to grow.

After installing ExaGrid at multiple locations,
Concur saw
improvements:

• Backups now meet the
  backup window goals.
• Restores, especially from
  databases, are fast by leveraging a copy of the most recent backup in
  ExaGrid’s high-speed landing zone.
• ExaGrid’s zone-level
  deduplication enables to store nearly 3PB of data using 177TB of disk
  space.
• Concur gained
  cost-effective scalability, as it can now add capacity in modular increments
  and pay as they grow.

In addition, the plug-and-play system integrated with
existing backup application, thanks to Exagrid’s partnerships with
backup software manufacturers.

Other companies with large amounts of data to backup
who have
turned to ExaGrid include:

• Aberdeen Asset Management
  PLC London, an investment management group.
• Connecticut State
  University System, a public university system in Connecticut.
• Cox Communications, a
  cable entertainment and broadband services provider.
• Hitachi Consulting, a
  global business and IT consulting company.
• Massachusetts Port
  Authority, a self-sustaining public transportation authority.
• Royal London Group, a mutual life and
  pensions company.

An August 2011 report by Gartner, Inc. confirms this trend
of organizations reevaluating their obsolete backup approaches. Entitled, Market Trends: Midsize Businesses Are Embracing New Backup Techniques and
Vendors, Gartner noted that the recovery market is in a "state of
modernization, which favors newer innovative solutions over established, market
share leaders and/or installed incumbent providers."

Sean Graver, storage
architect for Concur, said: "Our customers rely on Concur to manage and protect
their critical travel and expense data, and the ExaGrid gives us an unbeatable
combination of backup and restore speed, reliability and scalability to handle
large data volumes. ExaGrid’s post-process deduplication technology is light
years ahead of what we were using before, allowing us to perform multiple
restores each day where we have immediate access to data in the landing
zone."

Marc Crespi, VP of product
management for ExaGrid, said: "Concur’s situation is common to companies with
large data sizes and high data growth rates: Their organizations are plagued by
the ‘grow-break-replace’ cycle whereby as data grows, eventually the backup
infrastructure breaks and has to be replaced or upgraded. ExaGrid is the only
disk backup solution that solves that problem, and we’re pleased that Concur
found almost overnight success with ExaGrid’s proven architecture optimized for
backup and restore performance and cost-effective scalability."