travis' brain dump

So, it’s been a while since I’ve stroked some ego’s over at Exagrid in a blog post so here comes one and it’s more than due. First off, those who have read the posts and reached David Lyne or as we’ll call him from here on out “The Dave”, thanks for passing along that you got info from my site. It makes me feel like it’s worth writing these posts and people actually read them. 🙂

So… onto the expansion of self-image and speaking of “The Dave”. We had received three units for other locations in the company and upon setting them up we discovered a completely new look courtesy of the latest version update that included an overhaul of the GUI. Two words “F`n Sweet”. Everything I want to know about my sites in a nice summary snapshot with the ability to drill down into reports on anything I could think of at the touch of my fingers.  The only thing lacking? Our three units previously installed had no love.

One quick call over and David was on it. Updated completely on all systems in less than an hour. The product has come a long way even in the short time we’ve been using them.  I truly have enjoyed being able to check on information about specific deduplication jobs while they are occurring and seeing how they are faring. Not to mention being able to summarize all jobs based on the share and find out how it’s handling new additions to the backups.

So it’s not the clearest screenshot due to size constraints in this post, but the visuals are not the only reason why we’re ordering more. LOL  Our average de-duplication is still rocking along. I’m able to retrieve data back to June and we’re still clearing 11.67:1 in the whole site. Our biggest backup portion is at 13.63:1 that totals 41,135.6GB down into 3,018.84 GB. How’s that for some fun? Even better is the SQL backups. 18.66:1 (1,446.6 GB collapsed into 77.53 GB)

This build also seems much more stable than it’s predecessors and has been running quite well since we upgraded a few weeks ago. I’m really impressed with how things have been improving. Only one more site to go and we’ll be fully deployed. Ahhh… to be able to sleep at night. 🙂

All in all I have to give those guys out there at Exagrid a pat on the back for a job well done. Both in development *AND* support. 

As always, if anyone has questions, feel free to send them my way. I will hopefully get some time in the next few weeks to finish up a little white paper on optimizing bandwidth utilization using EX5000’s with Commvault.

Back to the grinding wheel! 🙂