![ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage](/images/ExaGrid_Logo.png)
In partnership with ExaGrid, HYCU purpose-built backup and recovery for Nutanix is the leader in Nutanix data protection.
With native platform protection and a fully integrated interface, few solutions are in better position to support a Nutanix-led data center.
ExaGrid enables enterprises to implement and scale HYCU with a lower cost up front and a lower cost over time using ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage approach. ExaGrid ensures a high-performance HYCU implementation with scale-out growth model fast restores and fast backups that meet your backup needs.
Why Do HYCU And Nutanix Need ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage approach?
With standard disk solutions, storing only a few copies of backups will work fine. The performance for backups and restores are fast, however, when retaining more than a few copies of backups, the disk required to store backups is cost prohibitive. Traditional inline deduplication solutions may help offset some storage costs, but the deduplication is performed inline, on the way to the disk. As a result HYCU backups are slowed, replication is slowed, and data is stored only in deduplicated form.
Why is this a problem?
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Traditional Deduplication Is Compute Intensive And Inherently Slows Backups, Resulting In A Longer Backup Window.
Many vendors put software on the backup servers in order to access additional compute to help keep up, but this steals compute from the backup environment. If you calculate the published ingest performance and rate that against the specified full backup size, the products with inline deduplication cannot keep up with themselves. All of the deduplication in the backup applications is inline, and all the large brand deduplication appliances also use the inline approach. All of these products slow down backups, resulting in a longer backup window.
Restore Performance Of Deduplicated Data Is A Challenge. Why?
If deduplication occurs inline, then all of the data on the disk is deduplicated and needs to be put back together, or “rehydrated,” for every restore request. This means that local restores, instant VM recoveries, audit copies, tape copies and all other requests will take hours to days. Most environments need VM boot times of single-digit minutes; however, with a pool of deduplicated data, a VM boot can take hours due to the time it takes to rehydrate the data. All of the deduplication in the backup applications as well as the large-brand deduplication appliances store only deduplicated data. All of these products are very slow for restores, offsite tape copies, and VM boots.
How Does ExaGrid Address Backup And Restore Performance On HYCU?
When you choose ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage for HYCU, each ExaGrid appliance includes a disk cache Landing Zone. Backup data is written directly to the Landing Zone versus being deduplicated on the way to the disk. This is the same as putting low-cost primary storage behind HYCU for fast backups and restores. This avoids inserting the compute intensive process in the backup – eliminating costly slow down. As a result, ExaGrid achieves backup performance of 432 TB/hr for a 2 petabyte full backup. This is the same performace as any low-cost primary storage disk, but is 3 times faster than any traditional inline data deduplication solution including deduplication performed in backup applications or target side deduplication appliances.
ExaGrid appliances allow each full backup to first land on the Landing Zone such that the system maintains the most recent backup in its full, undeduplicated form. This means fast restores, Instant VM recoveries (in seconds to minutes), and fast offsite tape copies. Since over 90% of restores and 100% of instant VM recoveries and tape copies are done from the most recent backup, this approach avoids the overhead incurred from “rehydrating” data during critical restores. As a result, restore, recovery, and copy times from an ExaGrid system are an order of magnitude faster than solutions that only store deduplicated data.
In most cases, ExaGrid is at least 20 times faster than any other solution including deduplication performed in backup applications or target side inline deduplication appliances. ExaGrid then tiers the long-term retention data into a long-term deduplicated data repository for storage cost efficiency.
ExaGrid Scales With Linear Performance Up To 2PB
Nutanix customers are well aware of the advantages of choosing hyperconverged solutions that include a scale-out architecture. ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage provides a scale-out storage architecture. Each ExaGrid appliance has Landing Zone storage, repository storage, processor, memory, and network ports. As data grows, ExaGrid appliances are added into the scale-out system, growing all resources linearly. The result is a fixed-length backup window and fast restores, regardless of data growth.
ExaGrid takes only a few seconds to configure and is often fully operational within 30 minutes.