ExaGrid and Veeam Chosen by Bridgestone Americas

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. announced that Bridgestone Americas, Inc. has streamlined its backup environment by implementing its hyperconverged backup with data deduplication.

Since switching to ExaGrid, Bridgestone reports results such as: 

• 79% reduction of weekly backup window
• Incremental backups every 3 hours that take 24 minutes each

Nashville, TN-based Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations (BATO) is a business unit of Bridgestone Americas, whose parent company, Bridgestone Corporation, is the world’s largest tire and rubber company. BATO develops, manufactures and markets Bridgestone, Firestone, and associate brand tires.

Corey Johnson, a technology analyst at Bridgestone’s Aiken PSR plant in South Carolina, realized that his company needed a modern approach to backing up its data: “We were working with old hardware and older, outdated software, and it was time to look into a more efficient backup system for our file server backups.“

After evaluating several big brand solutions, such as Dell EMC Data Domain, Johnson chose to install ExaGrid and Veeam as its new backup solution: “We felt that ExaGrid was the best system for us as far as its performance and scalability, and its data deduplication was also a major factor. We updated our hardware and moved toward virtualizing the environment, and took some advice from some of the other Bridgestone plants by updating our backup application to Veeam- and it just all fell together.“

Johnson backups data at Bridgestone’s Aiken PSR plant in daily incrementals and weekly fulls. The daily incrementals occur every three hours, taking 24 minutes each-an “impressive” ingest rate according to Johnson: “The backup window for our weekly full has been reduced from 19.5 hours to 4 hours.“

ExaGrid writes backups directly to a disk Landing Zone, avoiding inline processing and ensuring the highest possible backup performance, which results in the shortest backup window. Adaptive deduplication performs data deduplication and replication in parallel with backups while providing full system resources to the backups for the shortest backup window.

Available system cycles are utilized to perform deduplication and offsite replication for an optimal recovery point at the DR site. Once complete, the onsite data is protected and available in its undeduplicated form for fast restores, VM instant recoveries, and tape copies while the offsite data is ready for DR.

Johnson reports proactive customer support not experienced when dealing with other vendors.

ExaGrid’s customer support team is staffed by trained, in-house level 2 engineers who are assigned to individual accounts: “A lot of support engineers from other vendors are hit or miss – they are hard to get hold of, don’t understand my problem or environment, or they may be located offshore – but there hasn’t been a time that I have reached out to my ExaGrid support engineer without receiving a quick response. He has been an extreme help in getting our backups to where they need to be.“

Bridgestone case study