Case Study: Rushmore Electric Power Cooperative achieves 6‑hour backups, doubles protected data, and any‑point‑in‑time recovery with Dell Technologies

Continuous replication for mission-critical systems

Rushmore Electric Power Cooperative, a Rapid City, SD–based utility cooperative serving eight member co-ops, was struggling with an outdated backup solution that left about 50% of its data unprotected and often exceeded its backup window by days. To get faster, comprehensive protection and point‑in‑time recovery for critical grid and load‑monitoring systems, Rushmore turned to Dell Technologies and deployed Dell EMC Integrated Data Protection Appliances (IDPA) and Dell EMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines (RP4VMs).

Dell Technologies implemented two IDPA DP4400 appliances (onsite and at the DR site) with DD Boost deduplication and RP4VMs continuous replication integrated with VMware. As a result, nightly backup windows fell from more than two days to about six hours, daily admin time dropped from ~3 hours to 30 minutes or less, Rushmore now backs up roughly twice the data in the same capacity (36 TB system using ~19.8 TB, protecting ~96% of assets), and mission‑critical systems can be recovered to any point in time.

Rushmore Electric Power Cooperative

Sean Crooks

Systems Administrator