Case Study: American Valve & Hydrant achieves faster, tape-free backups and instant restores with ExaGrid

American Valve & Hydrant Makes Backups and Restores Faster with ExaGrid

American Valve & Hydrant (AVH), a Beaumont, Texas–based manufacturer of water works products and subsidiary of American Cast Iron Pipe Company, was struggling with tape-based backups that filled quickly and sometimes failed when users created large files during the day. Restores were slow and cumbersome, and nightly backup windows were long and unreliable, taking up to eight hours to complete.

AVH deployed an ExaGrid disk-based backup system with byte-level deduplication alongside CA ARCserve, replicating data to a DR-site ExaGrid and keeping tape only for weekly archives. Nightly backups dropped from eight to six hours and now complete reliably, restores that once required tape searches can be done in seconds, and deduplication has reclaimed significant disk space (leaving over 70% free), while the GRID architecture provides easy scalability and simpler management.

American Valve & Hydrant

Henry Sieffers

Assistant Manager, Information Services, American Valve & Hydrant