Portuguese Insurance Company Lusitania Utilizes ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. announced that CloudComputing.pt LDA, a Portuguese enterprise cloud computing strategy provider, led Lusitania, Companhia de Seguros, S.A to install ExaGrid’s tiered backup storage solution, which bolstered the insurance company’s data protection by increasing the capacity and variety of its backups.

Lusitania emerged in the insurance market in 1986 as the first insurance company with 100% Portuguese capital. Since then, and over more than 30 years, it has designed itself as a company with an eye on the future. A reliable partner, focusing on creating value for the national economy, in order to contribute decisively to the progress and well-being of the entire Portuguese society.

Its IT staff had modernized its infrastructure and used Veeam Software, Inc. to backup its VMware environment, but needed to add to that as the company’s data and backup needs grew.

“We wanted to expand our Veeam solution and we also needed to backup more Oracle databases and file servers, but we didn’t have enough time in our backup window to add more backup jobs,” said Miguel Rodelo, senior systems engineer, Lusitania. “We decided to test new solutions, and started to request proofs of concept for different products.“

Rodelo and his enterprise IT provider, David Domingos, chief sales officer, CloudComputing.pt, had attended VMworld 2018 in Barcelona, where they stopped by the ExaGrid booth at the conference to learn more about the tiered backup storage solution, and ended up requesting a POC.

“We decided together to bet on the ExaGrid technology,” said Rodelo. “I said that if the technology is as good as it claims to be I will buy it, and my reseller said that if it was that good, he would tell every client in Portugal about it.”

“ExaGrid was the last POC that we were analyzing, and it ended up being the fastest and easiest to implement, and compared to the other products we were looking into at the same time, it was clear that ExaGrid offered the best backup performance, especially when it came to our Oracle data. I expected ExaGrid to integrate well with Veeam, and it did, but when I saw that I can also use Oracle RMAN to make direct backups to ExaGrid, I decided to implement ExaGrid as our central storage for backups,” he added.

After working with ExaGrid to deliver backup storage to his client at Lusitania, DavidDomingos is eager to recommend the tiered backup storage solution to more CloudComputing.pt clients: “One of the best features of the ExaGrid system is that the client doesn’t feel the impact of data deduplication because of the Landing Zone feature. When you look at traditional storage, you run into capacity issues, but ExaGrid’s deduplication resolves those issues. In addition, ExaGrid speaks all of the languages of the backup apps and software, so if a client is using multiple approaches, such as Veeam and Oracle RMAN, or even Commvault or Veritas, ExaGrid will support all of them. ExaGrid is versatile and that adds to the value it brings our clients.“

ExaGrid writes backups directly to a disk-cache landing zone, avoiding inline processing and ensuring the high backup performance, which results in the shortest backup window. Adaptive deduplication performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups so that an RTO and RPO can be met. Available system cycles are utilized to perform deduplication and offsite replication for an optimal recovery point at the DR site. Once complete, the onsite data is protected and available in its undeduplicated form for fast restores, VM instant recoveries, and tape copies while the offsite data is ready for DR.

Case study: ExaGrid Supports Lusitania’s Diverse Backup Environment, Increasing Data Protection