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One of the great things about ExaGrid is that our customers are delighted with the operational gains they see from using our disk backup with data deduplication appliance.  Of more than 1,700 systems across nearly 500 customers, more than 130 customers have shared their success stories, and a recent one is BankWest.  If you are facing issues with data growth, long backup times, and IT time spent managing backups, perhaps there are some worthwhile lessons in their experience.

As the bank's data grew, their previous tape library could not keep up.  Their team would start a full backup on Friday and it would be completed the following Monday or Tuesday often delaying the differentials scheduled Monday - Thursday.  Since implementing ExaGrid, BankWest has seen dramatic results. The company's backup window has been cut by a factor of 90%--from three to four days to now only about six to eight hours. In addition, BankWest's IT department saves about four hours a week that used to be spent on administering and managing tape.

According to BankWest's IT manager, "Being able to write to disk to ExaGrid made the managing of our backups 10 times more efficient. We were spending several hours a week just holding the tape library's hand and monitoring tapes and switching them back and forth. Now, we are only spending a matter of minutes just to verify that everything is running smoothly."

For those who need to justify moving from tape to disk, this is how BankWest described their situation. The bank looked into upgrading its tape drives with new hardware and compared that with moving to a disk-based system. "After evaluating all of our options and comparing tape and disk, it was clear that a disk was the best solution for us.  Continuing with tape was going to cost us too much money and it wouldn't provide us with the scalability that we had to have."

 "In the end, it was easy to justify the cost of moving to ExaGrid. When we considered the cost of upgrading our tape libraries and the ongoing cost associated with maintaining and managing tapes, it was a no brainer financially."

 We hope this story is helpful for you.  Best wishes for an enjoyable holiday season!