Customer Stories

posted on 05 June 2008 20:19

Hitachi Consulting, a subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd, has chosen ExaGrid's deduplication product and is not using fellow Hitachi subsidiary Hitachi Data System's Diligent deduplication product.

Hitachi Consulting is a global business and IT consulting company and its client base includes 25 percent of the Global 100, as well as many leading mid-market companies. It is based in Dallas, Texas, with offices in North America, Europe and Asia.

Diligent's ProtecTIER deduplication product is offered by Hitachi Data Systems. Recently HDS competitor IBM acquired Diligent.

Hitachi Consulting chose ExaGrid to work with its backup application, Symantec's Veritas NetBackup, after evaluating several competing solutions, including ones from Data Domain, Quantum and Ubistor. The firm purchased a total of six ExaGrid systems for primary site backup and for disaster recovery from an offsite location. Three systems are located at Hitachi Consulting's data center in Dallas, and backup data is replicated to the other three systems located at the Hitachi Consulting office in Addison, Texas.

Bradford Leonard, Network Engineer at Hitachi Consulting, said: "The ExaGrid system was much more cost-effective than the other solutions and it integrated nicely with NetBackup. Because the ExaGrid system performs data de-duplication post-process, we knew that we could just dump our data onto the disk and then the ExaGrid would de-duplicate the data behind the scenes. Post-process data de-duplication also makes our backups run faster than on-the-fly, in-line approaches. Our nightly backups have been reduced from 12 hours to just 3 hours."

The ExaGrid approach uses byte-level data de-duplication, which stores only the byte-level changes from backup to backup instead of storing full file copies. This reduces the disk space required by a range of 10:1 to 50:1 or more, delivering substantial cost savings.

Hitachi Consulting found several advantages when using the combination of NetBackup and ExaGrid instead of tape. In particular, the firm was able to realize cost savings on licenses and maintenance fees, was able to be more flexible with its procedures to maximize the efficiency of its backups, and also improve data retention and restoration.

Bill Andrews, president and CEO of ExaGrid Systems, said: "The ExaGrid disk-based backup system was designed to work with existing backup applications to quickly, easily and cost-effectively reduce long backup windows and eliminate the hassles of tape."

^{[Chris Mellor.]}