Aspen Technology Selects ExaGrid

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. announced that Aspen Technology, Inc. (AspenTech) has modernized its backup and recovery environment by replacing its tape libraries with its disk-based backup systems in conjunction with Veeam Availability Suite.

AspenTech, headquartered in the US, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a software supplier that optimizes asset performance in complex, industrial environments with software and insights that run assets faster, safer, longer, and greener. Its integrated solutions for capital-intensive industries optimize assets across the design, operations, and maintenance lifecycle, which automates knowledge work and builds sustainable competitive advantage.

Migrating backups from AspenTech’s Quantum Corp.‘s tape libraries and Dell EMC NetWorker to ExaGrid and Veeam has resulted in improvements in its backup and recovery environment, including:

• A reduction in backup storage and related costs.
• A shortened backup window (e.g., down from 24 hours to 1 hour).
• Fast and easy VM recoveries and data restores, improving IT’s user response time.

The introduction of data deduplication to AspenTech’s environment maximized its backup storage by reducing its data footprint.

“Deduplication has saved us from what used to cause a lot of headaches,” said Richard Copithorne, principal systems administrator, AspenTech. “When I look at our environment-just at our HQs alone-we are getting terrific deduplication, which saves us significant money on disk, and we don’t worry about running out of storage anytime soon.“

Changing backup solutions has also had a significant impact on AspenTech’s nightly backup jobs.

“We are able to backup our entire environment at HQs in four hours, and in some of our international locations, the entire environment is backed up in an hour. Using tape, a full backup of a VM would sometimes take 24 hours, but we are now able to leverage ExaGrid and Veeam to backup the same amount of data in an hour, and that includes deduplication,” said Copithorne.

In addition to data reduction and improved backup windows, data restoration became a quick and efficient process. According to Copithorne, one of the more significant advantages of using ExaGrid with Veeam is the ability to stand up a VM almost immediately with just a few clicks, and doing an instant VM restore or creating a clone copy is “amazingly easy.” Single file restores from tape that previously took up to an hour take ten minutes, enabling IT to be more responsive to user requests.

Like most other organizations still using tape libraries, AspenTech’s IT staff found the backup and restore/recovery process to be highly time consuming, taking them away from other important IT initiatives. The efficiency gains resulting from the system’s performance and reliability alleviates the need for Copithorne to be hands-on, and he has found that to be an advantage.

“We find it incredibly easy to manage our backups across the globe from a single pane of glass,” said Copithorne, and he has found ExaGrid customer support to be unique in its approach compared to the industry standard. “Having worked with vendors such as HP and Dell EMC, I can speak from experience – their support isn’t nearly as streamlined as ExaGrid’s. When I need support, I typically receive a response within half an hour, and with ExaGrid’s automated alert system, my support engineer gets in touch with me and usually knows what’s going on before I do.“

AspenTech customer success story