Jordan’s Furniture Opts for ExaGrid-Veeam Solution

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. announced that Jordan’s Furniture is using its disk-based backup system with Veeam Backup & Replication to solve the problems of limited capacity and growing data volumes in its virtual environment.

As a result, the company can better protect its virtual data and leverage all the features of both products within a single tightly integrated solution.

Jordan’s Furniture is a New England-based furniture retailer founded in the early 1900s, and acquired by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. The company has six locations in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. Jordan’s is combining entertainment and shopping, with each store offering an experience including IMAX 3D Theatres, Liquid Fireworks, Motion Odyssey Movie (MOM) rides, and full service restaurants.

Jordan’s Furniture had virtualized its infrastructure and was using an EMC Avamar system to backup and protect its data. However, with the company’s rapid growth, capacity issues and the need for better DR surfaced. A new solution was needed to backup not only its physical servers but its virtual infrastructure as well. Jordan’s had been using ExaGrid to backup its physical servers running Solaris, and after looking again at EMC Avamar and EMC Data Domain decided to expand its use of the ExaGrid system and also purchase Veeam Backup and Replication to deliver greater availability across its virtual infrastructure. The retailer is using Veeam for its virtual infrastructure and ExaGrid for its entire backup environment.

The combination of ExaGrid’s and Veeam’s availability solutions allows Jordan’s Furniture to utilize Veeam Backup & Replication in vSphere and Hyper-V virtual environments on ExaGrid’s disk-based backup system with data deduplication. This combination provides fast backups and efficient storage as well as replication to an offsite location for DR. The ExaGrid system leverages Backup & Replication’s built-in backup to disk capabilities and ExaGrid’s zone-level data deduplication for additional data reduction – and cost reduction – over standard disk solutions. Customers like Jordan’s can use Veeam Backup & Replication’s built-in source-side deduplication in concert with ExaGrid’s disk-based backup system with zone-level deduplication to further shrink backups.

“We liked that Veeam and ExaGrid are tightly integrated. We chose Veeam because it was built for virtualized environments, enables extremely fast recoveries, and automates many of the tasks associated with deploying new VM backups. We also had experience with the ExaGrid system here in our environment and were impressed with its ability to quickly and efficiently replicate information between datacenters,” said Ethan Peterson, network engineer, Jordan’s Furniture. “The ExaGrid system was far more cost effective than the EMC offerings, and we liked its scalability and ease of use.“

The company found that the combination of Veeam and ExaGrid made for an efficient experience. The ExaGrid-Veeam Accelerated Data Mover is integrated with all ExaGrid appliances and allows all Veeam backups, restores, and recoveries to complete faster. This made it the perfect fit for Jordan’s Furniture.

“Veeam and ExaGrid work together extremely well and deliver features designed specifically for virtualized environments, like a data mover that helps to make backups and recoveries faster and more efficient,” said Peterson. “It’s a very well integrated solution, and we’re able to do synthetic full backups every night so backup times are minimized.“

Veeam’s ‘set-it-and forget-it’ experience provides ease of use for the company along with Instant VM Recovery that enabled Jordan’s to thin out its environment. Jordan’s Furniture has a two-site ExaGrid system that is both efficient and cost effective. ExaGrid’s GRID-based systems provide room for expansion while maintaining all aspects of performance.

“Because the ExaGrid system was so cost effective, we were able to purchase a system that was a lot bigger than we need today for our virtual infrastructure. However, we recently expanded our ExaGrid system to handle more capacity and we also added a system for DR. The process was painless,” said Peterson.

Jordan Furniture can perform replication of backups to offsite storage for DR purposes without sacrificing performance of critical backup and recovery features. By combining the power and performance of Veeam-based vSphere and Hyper-V VM backups with the ExaGrid appliance, the company achieves backup and DR goals.

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