French Sigma Group Chooses ExaGrid Through Infinidis

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. announced that Infidis SARL, an IT integrator and solutions provider, led the Sigma Group SAS to choose its tiered backup storage solution to enhance data protection and optimize its backups and data restoration capabilities, needed to offer its customers backup-as-a-service.

The Sigma Group is a digital services company based in France, specialized in software publishing, integration of tailor-made digital solutions, and outsourcing of information systems and cloud solutions. It uses ExaGrid to store customer backups, as well as its own backed up data, in addition to using ExaGrid to replicate data from its primary site to its DR site.

Adding ExaGrid to The Sigma Group’s backup environment has allowed the company to keep up with customer data growth and deliver on its SLAs.

“To meet Sigma’s expectations, Infidis proposed the ExaGrid solution because of the many benefits it offers such as performance that is guaranteed over time, predictable costs, a scalable architecture which allows for progressive and granular investments as needed, very fast tape copy, and easily maintained long-term retention,” said Frédéric Floret, IT business engineer, Infidis.

“Using ExaGrid allows us to provide high-quality backup services to our customers,” said Mickaël Collet, cloud architect, Sigma. “We guarantee high SLAs especially on backup services and ExaGrid helps us to deliver on those. Our backup services include performance commitments on restorations and ExaGrid’s Landing Zone allows us to keep the freshest data in a non-deduplicated format to guarantee optimal restoration performance.“

The Sigma Group is responsible for backing up 650TB of customer data, which is backed up in daily incremental, as well as weekly and monthly fulls. Its IT staff has found that ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture has been helpful in keeping up with growing data.

“We need to adjust capacity as closely as possible to customer needs and not have to oversize backup infrastructures based on growth forecasts,” said Alexandre Chaillou, infrastructure manager, Sigma. “We started with two ExaGrid systems, with one appliance at our primary data center and one at our remote data center. We expanded our two ExaGrid systems, which now are made up of 14 ExaGrid appliances. ExaGrid’s scale-out approach allows us to add capacity while making it possible to only add what is needed.“

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

All of ExaGrid’s appliances contain not disk and also processing power, memory, and bandwidth. When the system needs to expand, additional appliances are attached to the existing system.

This type of configuration allows the system to maintain all the aspects of performance as the amount of data grows, allowing organizations to pay for what they need when they need it. Appliances of any size or age can be mixed and matched in a single system with capacities of up to a 2PB full backup plus retention and an ingest rate of up to 432TB per hour. Once virtualized, they appear as a single system to the backup server, and load balancing of all data across servers is automatic.

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