Case Study: Direct Relief reduces recovery time from days to minutes with Carbonite Hybrid Backup

Direct Relief ditches tape for Carbonite Hybrid Backup

Direct Relief is a 74‑employee nonprofit and the largest U.S. charitable provider of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, supporting disaster and poverty‑related health needs worldwide. Its IT team—six people managing about 40 Windows servers and a hosted SAP system—was hampered by an error‑prone, tape‑based backup process that was time‑consuming to manage and could take days to restore data, leaving users to recreate lost work rather than request restores.

Direct Relief replaced tape with Carbonite Hybrid Backup powered by EVault, backing up about 2 TB locally and archiving to the cloud; Carbonite supplied preconfigured Dell servers and hands‑on support, and bandwidth throttling was used to avoid disrupting users. The change cut recovery time from days to minutes, eliminated tape problems, freed IT time for strategic work, and delivered reliable, fast restores—especially for critical Exchange data.

Direct Relief

Aaron Skinner

Senior Systems Administrator