Heil Trailer Chooses ExaGrid

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. announced that Heil Trailer International has selected the ExaGrid system to gain faster and more efficient backups and restores.

Heil Trailer International produces a complete line of tank trailers and specialty trailers. Heil trailers are marketed both directly and indirectly through distributors to customers in the construction, trucking, railroad, oil field, towing and recovery, and heavy haul industries, as well as to various government agencies, both domestically and internationally. Based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Heil Trailer International has manufacturing facilities in the United States, Argentina and Thailand, as well as service facilities in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Heil purchased two ExaGrid systems. The primary ExaGrid system is located in Heil’s data center in Athens, TN, and a second system acts as a disaster recovery site and is located 45 miles away in its Chattanooga office. The ExaGrid system works alongside Heil’s existing backup application, Symantec Backup Exec.

“It’s been our experience that because ExaGrid performs data de-duplication at the byte level, it’s more efficient than products with block-level data de-duplication. Also, the fact that ExaGrid performs data de-duplication post-process instead of in-line means that backups and restores are faster,” said David Duggan, global network manager for Heil Trailer International. “And since the ExaGrid system only moves the bytes that change across the network, creating a disaster recovery site was more feasible because our replications are much, much smaller than they would have been without such effective data de-duplication,” said Duggan.

After installing the ExaGrid system, Heil Trailer experienced data de-duplication ratios of 50 to 60:1. Backup times have been reduced from 48 hours to less than 12 hours for full backups, and the firm is now able to perform nightly incremental backups throughout the week, sometimes taking only an hour.

Since Heil is a fast growing company, scalability was also a critical consideration in purchasing the ExaGrid system. ExaGrid’s GRID computing software makes the system highly scalable. When plugged into a switch, different sized server configurations can be combined into a single GRID system with capacities for up to a 60TB full backup, plus retention. Once virtualized, all servers appear as a single system to the backup server, making load balancing of all data across servers automatic.

“Companies like Heil, who are struggling to keep up with daily tape backups, can move to disk-based backups for the same cost as a new tape-based system, while gaining faster and easier backups and restores,” said Bill Andrews, president and CEO of ExaGrid. “Additionally, ExaGrid’s advanced byte-level data de-duplication capabilities make it cost-effective to back up data to disk at an off-site location for disaster recovery purposes.”