U.S. Legal Support Deploys ExaGrid-Veeam Accelerated Data Mover

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. announced that U.S. Legal Support, Inc. has deployed the ExaGrid-Veeam Accelerated Data Mover for fast and efficient data protection.

The combination of ExaGrid’s virtual server data protection solutions and Veeam Software availability solutions allows U.S. Legal to utilize Veeam Backup & Replication in vSphere and Hyper-V virtual environments on ExaGrid’s disk-based backup system.

U.S. Legal Support was founded in 1996 and is a privately-held company with over 60 offices located across the US. Itt is a provider of litigation services; it’s the only litigation support company that provides court reporting, record retrieval, litigation, eDiscovery, and trial services to major insurance companies, corporations, and law firms nationwide.

U.S. Legal Support has large databases that contain audio and video files of depositions and exhibits from numerous court cases. The company consolidated the management of its datacenter operations after a few years of outsourcing them to the cloud. The next challenge? To find a cost-effective and efficient backup solution that would efficiently protect its more than 100TB of data, which was growing larger every day.

“We discovered that two of the big problems with hosted storage are cost and speed, especially if your data is in the multi-TB range and higher,” said Ryan McClain, systems architect, U.S. Legal Support. “We were spending more than $3,000 per month for 30TB of backup storage with one of our providers. We tried to backup to the cloud, but once we hit the 30TB mark, we couldn’t backup the data fast enough, even though we were using a 200MB connection. Then, if an error occurred, we’d have to start all over again. It was horrible and extremely time-consuming.“

U.S. Legal Support turned to a disk-based backup solution and found ExaGrid to be the best option due to its ability to provide quick backup and deduplication. The legal services firm uses a combination of the deduplication built into Veeam along with ExaGrid’s Zone deduplication to maximize data reduction. After the data is passed from Veeam, the ExaGrid system de-duplicates it again, with a reduction ratio of 3.97:1. In total, the company is able to store 116TB of data in 30TB of space on its two ExaGrid systems.

Plus, it integrates with Veeam Backup & Replication which provides recovery of virtualized applications and data. The resulting ExaGrid solution reduced backup times by 84% and network resources while delivering a simple to manage solution to solve their backup challenge.

“Our backup times are so much faster using Veeam with the ExaGrid system,” said McClain. “Other benefits have been stability and reliability. Because the ExaGrid is a purpose-built system and not a general purpose NAS box, backups run more consistently and trouble-free than before. I spend three to six fewer hours per week dealing with backup issues.“

In addition to faster backup times and reduced hours and resources needed, ExaGrid and Veeam’s grid-based, scalable systems expand with growing volumes of data, leaving room for expansion.

“Having the ExaGrid system in place completes the picture, so now our backup infrastructure can easily grow with our backup demands,” McClain said.

ExaGrid uses a grid-based configuration, so when the system needs to expand, additional appliances are attached to the grid, bringing with them not only additional disk but also processing power, memory, and bandwidth. This type of configuration allows the system to maintain all the aspects of performance as the amount of data grows. In addition, as new ExaGrid appliances are added to the grid, the ExaGrid load balances available capacity, maintaining a virtual pool of storage that is shared across the grid.

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