CASE STUDY
ABOUT TRUSTPOWER
Trustpower Limited is a New Zealandbased
company offering electricity,
Internet, phone and gas services and
is listed on the New Zealand stock
exchange. As a leading electricity
generator and retailer in the country,
Trustpower supplies electricity to more
than 230,000 customers nationwide
and 100,000 telecommunications
customer connections, powering
numerous homes and businesses
nationwide. Trustpower’s electricity
generation has a strong focus on
sustainability, with 38 hydro
power stations across 19 hydroelectric
power schemes.
tool as well. Veeam now safeguards the ISP’s
mail system and other critical services that
run on over 50 virtual servers.
Sanders said: “One of the great benefits
of Veeam is its granularity in backup – I
can restore entire virtual machines or drill
into backup images to restore files – for
example, pulling out individual mailboxes or
messages from our mail platform backups
very easily. So, if any of our customers
accidentally deletes important email, we
can help them restore it.”
To store and protect the ISP’s main
production data, Trustpower chose a
mixture of Pure Storage and HPE Nimble
for their primary storage, as both
vendors were validated by Veeam and
integrated well, allowing Sanders’s team
to do snapshots and restores seamlessly.
Similarly, for the secondary storage of
backup data, Trustpower wanted a Veeamvalidated
system that would also work
well with VMware.
In 2018, Sanders attended the VeeamON
Forum in Auckland where he met an ExaGrid
representative who explained how ExaGrid’s
backup solution integrates seamlessly with
Trustpower’s existing virtual environment
and Veeam backup system. Trustpower was
assigned an ExaGrid support engineer to take
Sanders and his team through the evaluation
and installation process, offering close
regional support throughout installation and
through the life of the product.
ExaGrid provides a support package in each
time zone, which includes responsive support
from a level-2 engineer, opt-in remote
system monitoring, next-day shipping of hotswappable
hardware replacements and free
software upgrades.
By implementing the Veeam–ExaGrid
solution it enabled Trustpower’s ISP ICT
team to establish a nightly backup schedule
and convert geographically diverse passive
sites into active sites that cross-replicate
backups for greater data protection.
Data is backed up to the local ExaGrid
system and then cross-replicated to
Trustpower’s multiple sites, using ExaGrid
and Veeam’s replication technologies, so
that data is available and recoverable from
any of its sites.
Sanders has tested the data restoration
process and is pleased that he can recover
data quickly and keep customers connected
to the Internet. “I’m able to sleep better
at night, with the confidence that we can
restore critical services if required. After all,
a backup strategy is only as good as the last
validated restore,” he said.
ExaGrid writes backups directly to a disk
Landing Zone which results in the shortest
backup window. ExaGrid’s Adaptive
Deduplication performs deduplication
and replication in parallel with backups
while providing full system resources to the
backups for the shortest backup window.
Once complete, the on-site data is
protected and immediately available in
its full undeduplicated form for fast
restores. ExaGrid can use Veeam’s
Instant VM Recovery feature to quickly
recover a VMware virtual machine (VM) by
running it directly from the ExaGrid
appliance if the primary storage VM
becomes unavailable, ensuring missioncritical
VMs and applications are always
available to the business.
Sanders concluded: “Veeam and ExaGrid
are the core of our backup and replication
strategy. The way Veeam integrates with
VMware and manipulates the virtual
environment is superb. The combined
Veeam–ExaGrid solution has cut our backup
times in half, and the seamless movement
of data between our data centers has been
invaluable to the company. I wouldn’t
be comfortable with any other product
combination for backup and replication in
our environment.”
“Our solution now is completely VMware,
Veeam and ExaGrid. It’s solved our
problems and with the success of this rollout,
we plan to replicate this infrastructure
more widely across our business network,”
said Sanders.
The results
• 50% reduction in backup window.
Moving from an outdated physical
backup storage system to Veeam and
implementing ExaGrid’s Adaptive
Deduplication process, Trustpower
streamlined its backup window by 50%.
I’M ABLE TO
SLEEP BETTER
AT NIGHT, WITH
THE CONFIDENCE
THAT WE
CAN RESTORE
CRITICAL
SERVICES IF
REQUIRED.
• Maximum data protection with
replication to multiple sites. Veeam
and ExaGrid’s combined solution has
allowed the business to replicate backups
to the extended data center network
allowing near-instant access to data
across several locations and reliable
recovery if production storage fails.
• Strong support and foolproof products
vital for New Zealand company’s
success. For a company that requires
24/7 connectivity in a remote location
like New Zealand, timely support from
the ExaGrid staff has made a world of
difference. As for Veeam, the product is so
intuitive that “it just works.” •
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