Wenatchee Valley College Chooses ExaGrid-Veeam Tiered Backup Storage With Ransomware Recovery

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. announced that Wenatchee Valley College (WVC) switched to an ExaGrid-Veeam Software, Inc.‘s solution for superior data protection and to implement a strategy for ransomware recovery.

The college enriches North Central Washington by serving educational and cultural needs of communities and residents throughout the service area. It provides high-quality transfer, liberal arts, professional/technical, basic skills, and continuing education for students of diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds. The Wenatchee campus is located near the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains, midway between Seattle and Spokane. The WVC at Omak campus is located near the Canadian border in Omak, about 100 miles north of Wenatchee.

“A college in our system suffered a massive ransomware attack and all of their servers were impacted, including their backup data, so they couldn’t recover anything. We’ve used their experience as a case study to improve on the areas that they were weak on, the root causes of how it happened, when it happened, and what led up to that ransomware – then made changes to our environment and instituted best practices. Now, even if we are impacted, if our VMware environment and our servers are impacted, we know that the ExaGrid data will not be impacted,” said Steve Garcia, the college’s information security officer. “We scrapped our old solution and went with an ExaGrid system and Veeam, which tied in nicely with our VMware infrastructure. The combined solution of ExaGrid and Veeam is amazing! They work very well together. Now that I’ve used the ExaGrid-Veeam solution, I’ve recommended it to colleagues at other community colleges as a solid, reliable solution for any backup infrastructure needs.“

ExaGrid provides tiered backup storage with a front-end disk-cache landing zone and separate retention tier containing all retention data. Data are written directly to its network facing disk-cache landing zone, then it is tiered into a non-network facing long-term retention repository where it is stored as deduplicated data objects to reduce the storage cost of long-term retention data.

ExaGrid’s approach to ransomware is called retention time-lock. It prevents hackers from deleting or encrypting backups in ExaGrid system’s retention tier. The company has the only non-network-facing tiered backup storage solution (a tiered air gap) with delayed deletes and immutable deduplication objects.

This approach ensures when a ransomware attack occurs, data can be recovered or VMs booted from the ExaGrid tiered backup storage system. Not only can primary storage be restored, but all long-term backup retention data also remains intact after a ransomware attack.

“It offers peace of mind knowing we have a robust backup system, and that if we are attacked by ransomware, we will get our data back and can resume normal operations. We take precautions to make sure when that does happen – I used to say if that happens, but it’s a matter of when now, from my perspective – when that happens, we can recover and we can get our end users back to their day-to-day operations with all their data,” said Garcia.

Case study: Wenatchee Valley College Switches to ExaGrid for Increased Security and Better Backup Performance