Colleges and Universities choosing ExaGrid

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. says that higher education institutions are increasingly choosing ExaGrid’s disk-based backup appliances with deduplication to gain faster backups and restores and seamless scalability as data grows.

As a result of implementing ExaGrid, IT departments at a growing number of prestigious colleges and universities have reduced backup times by up to 90%, improved offsite disaster recovery capabilities, reduced or eliminated tape backup, and dramatically sped up their restores of files, objects, and virtual machines – while also avoiding costly “forklift upgrades” associated with other approaches that do not scale easily.

Higher education institutions are choosing ExaGrid’s disk backup with deduplication to meet their backup and recovery needs in large part because of ExaGrid’s unique approach to disk backup, which combines compute with capacity as data grows in a “scale-out” architecture along with a landing zone for rapid restores. Other disk backup solutions that expand in a “scale-up” architecture by adding just disk capacity without adding compute resources result in downstream problems including ever-expanding backup windows and expensive forklift upgrades. These other solutions also only store deduplicated data, resulting in slow system restores and tape copies, and slow recoveries of files, VMs and objects that take hours versus minutes. ExaGrid is the only solution that permanently shortens backup windows without expensive forklift upgrades, and also enables the fastest full system restores and rapid restore of files, VMs and objects in as fast as minutes.

The higher education institutions that have turned to ExaGrid to solve their backup challenges include:
· Keene State College: The Keene State College IT department selected ExaGrid to meet its need for shorter backup windows and greater backup reliability. After implementing the ExaGrid system, the team was able to reduce the backup time for the college’s main file server by 95%, from 20 hours to just 45 minutes.
· Furman University: Furman University turned to ExaGrid’s appliances to replace its aging tape library. ExaGrid offered the university a faster, more reliable backup solution that reduced the amount of time spent managing tape backups. Since implementing the ExaGrid disk backup with deduplication solution, Furman’s IT team reported a dramatic reduction in backup data by 22:1 and a 75% reduction in nightly backup times – from as much as six hours to about 90 minutes.
· Plymouth State University: The Plymouth State University IT department needed to move away from tape, and chose disk-based backup to make their data protection processes faster and more reliable. ExaGrid was an ideal choice as the appliance worked with the university’s existing backup application and made switching from tape easy. Since installation, the university has cut its backup windows in half and achieved data deduplication ratios as high as 20:1 with 30 days of retention.
Sarah Lawrence College: Sarah Lawrence College’s IT team knew that it wanted to move away from tape, and even considered backing up to primary disk in a co-location facility. The team chose ExaGrid’s disk backup with deduplication as a way to reduce backup data volumes and the high projected cost of disk space, power draw, and rack space in the co-location facility. Since backing up to ExaGrid, the IT department has seen the college’s backup window reduced from between 24-36 hours per week to 10-12 hours.