Case Study: American Railcar Industries achieves 50% shorter backup windows and significant cost and time savings with ExaGrid

American Railcar Switches to ExaGrid from Tape – Results in 50% Shorter Backup Windows and Cost/Time Savings

American Railcar Industries (ARI), a leading North American designer and manufacturer of hopper and tank railcars, was struggling with tape-based backups using Veritas Backup Exec. Storing tapes offsite made restores slow and costly—sometimes taking days—while media, transportation and storage expenses, tape failures and lost tapes drove up retention costs and stretched backup cycles to nearly 24 hours.

ARI deployed ExaGrid appliances at its primary and DR sites and switched Backup Exec to use OpenStorage Technology with ExaGrid’s disk landing zone. The move cut backup windows by about 50% (longest jobs from ~24 to ~12 hours), enabled deduplication ratios as high as 21:1 (e.g., 6TB → 315GB), eliminated hundreds of tapes, improved security and restore speed, simplified management, and delivered proactive support.

American Railcar Industries

John Bivens

System Administrator