ExaGrid's Eye on Deduplication

GreenBank is a Tennessee chartered commercial bank with more than 60 branch locations, and after having grown quickly by acquiring several other banks, found that their tape library could no longer keep up. Weekend full backups were taking three days to complete and incremental backups were taking over 24 hours. With banks open seven days a week, it was critical for their backups to be completed within their backup windows every night, but the tape backups took too long and often failed before completion. Restores were also time-consuming and difficult to perform using tape. Jason O'Dell, IT manager for GreenBank, described their old backup application, tapes and tape drives as "a nightmare to get everything properly backed up."

GreenBank has one ExaGrid system located in its Greeneville datacenter, and a second system to replicate data to its disaster recovery site. Incremental backup times have been cut in half and are now completed in less than 12 hours, and full backups have been cut from three days to just 24 hours. In addition, GreenBank is now cost-effectively retaining nearly three months of data, and their helpdesk easily performs restores for end users, cutting time-consuming tape inventory delays and restores. The cost savings on tape alone is nearly $24,000.

Jason also commented, "With ExaGrid our backups are now completed consistently every night and our IT staff spends far less time managing and administering backup processes and tapes. The ability to reliably backup all the data received from many servers at many locations has allowed the team to work on more strategic projects."  To read the full story, click here.

The InfoWorld 100 award comes on the heels of two other awards that we did not have the chance to blog. Last month, ExaGrid's disk backup with data deduplication system was named winner of the Tech Awards Circle, taking Bronze in the Best Midrange Hardware category.

And in mid-September, ExaGrid's customer, Gardner Trucking, was named winner of Info Security Products Guide's 2009 Best Deployment Scenario Award in Data Recovery. Gardner chose ExaGrid's disk-based backup system with data deduplication based on its scalability and unique approach to data deduplication, and beyond those factors, the ExaGrid system also cost approximately 25 percent of the cost of competitive solutions. Coincidentally, two days after they installed the ExaGrid system and switched from tape, a database crashed. With the ExaGrid backup system in place, it took only 25 minutes to restore the data, but most importantly, Gardner avoided the two days of system downtime and an estimated loss of $200,000 in business and productivity they would have incurred if they had to restore their database from tape. To read more about this case study, visit http://www.infosecurityproductsguide.com/casestudies/.