Case Study: Trail Appliances achieves dramatically faster, reliable backups and eliminates tape headaches with ExaGrid disk backup and deduplication

Appliance Retailer Eliminates Data Protection Pains With Disk Backup With Data Deduplication

Trail Appliances, a rapidly growing family‑owned appliance retailer with eight locations in Western Canada, was struggling with an aging tape‑based backup process. Using Symantec Backup Exec to write to tape, backups were taking up to 14 hours, frequently failing, and required significant labor to manage more than 30 tapes and offsite rotations as data volumes grew.

Trail replaced tape with an ExaGrid disk‑based backup appliance that works with its existing Backup Exec jobs and uses post‑process deduplication. The change cut backup windows to about three to four hours, dramatically reduced storage needs (high deduplication ratios), virtually eliminated weekly tape handling tasks, improved reliability, and provided a scalable platform that freed IT staff to focus on other projects.

Trail Appliances

Karen Parliament

IT Manager, Trail Appliances