To be compelling to customers, OGD knew that it needed its IaaS solution to be incredibly robust and stable so that it could deliver against a range of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The IaaS solution also needed to be capable of scaling, without huge additional cost, to meet the g rowth demands of each customer. And, it needed to be very easy to implement so that OGD could meet these growth demands without a huge investment in support staff. As a result, OGD began to select best-in-class providers for all of the components of the IaaS solution.
"We were certain that we wanted to build our IaaS platform around VMware's vSphere from the beginning," said Joep Piscaer, CTO at OGD. "However, we had to make sure that we could find a vendor or combination of vendors who provide a data movement and backup solution that is best-in-class in a virtual environment and that meets our specific platform requirements. We found that with the integration of ExaGrid and Veeam."
Piscaer found that all backups, restores and recoveries would complete accurately and the fastest with the
ExaGrid-Veeam Accelerated Data Mover. Moreover, the Veeam backup server most efficiently inter-operates with its Veeam data mover using its optimized Veeam communications versus generic CIFS. And, the entire synthetic full operation occurs on the ExaGrid appliance, eliminating the need to move data between the Veeam backup server and backup storage, which greatly reduces the time to complete a synthetic full.
OGD knew that protecting customer data was vital to success. In fact, OGD decided that to stand out from the competition, it would differentiate its platform on recoverability rather than just performance grounds. The ExaGrid-Veeam solution also delivered the ability to instantly recover a VMware (or Hyper-V) virtual machine (VM). This is made possible via ExaGrid's unique landing zone feature, a high-speed cache that retains the most recent backups in complete form. Using Veeam's Instant VM Recovery, OGD could run the VMware VM directly from the backup on the ExaGrid appliance. Once the primary storage environment is brought back, the VM running on the ExaGrid appliance could then be transparently migrated to the primary storage for continued operation. This would ensure OGD would deliver on all SLAs -- customers would have full control, and the ability to restore data at will.
ExaGrid's scale-out architecture and unique approach to deduplication were also central to OGD's purchase decision. Piscaer noted that ExaGrid's scale-out approach provides OGD with the plug-and-play performance the company needs to be able to grow their platform -- with none of the growth limitations of the scale-up vendors. He added that the most important factor behind OGD's decision was the way ExaGrid handles deduplication.
"It is the separate Landing Zone and Repository that make it possible for us to deliver the Gold-level RTO," said Piscaer. "Most importantly, the level of integration between Veeam and ExaGrid is a major advantage to our business and has completed the chain for us. The fact that the two vendors work together at an engineering level -- and that ExaGrid is a supported backup platform for Veeam -- means we have nothing to worry about."
