AspenTech, headquartered in the U.S., Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a leading 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 tape libraries and Dell EMC NetWorker to ExaGrid and Veeam has resulted in many substantial 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 at AspenTech. “When I look at our environment—just at our headquarters 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 back up our entire environment at headquarters 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 back up 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 now 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 a significant 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!”
Read the complete AspenTech customer success story to learn more about the company’s experience using ExaGrid.
ExaGrid’s published customer success stories and enterprise stories number over 360, more than all other vendors in the space combined. These stories demonstrate how satisfied customers are with ExaGrid’s unique architectural approach, differentiated product, and unrivalled customer support. Customers consistently state that not only is the product best-in-class, but ‘it just works.’
About ExaGrid
ExaGrid provides hyper-converged secondary storage for backup with data deduplication, a unique landing zone, and scale-out architecture. ExaGrid’s landing zone provides for the fastest backups, restores, and instant VM recoveries. Its scale-out architecture includes full appliances in a scale-out system and ensures a fixed-length backup window as data grows, eliminating expensive forklift upgrades. Visit us at www.exagrid.com or connect with us on LinkedIn. See what our customers have to say about their own ExaGrid experiences and why they now spend significantly less time on backup.
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