Case Study: Carter Machinery achieves an 88% backup-window reduction and robust, tape-free recovery with ExaGrid

Carter Installs ExaGrid, Reduces Backup Window By 88%, Provides Users with ‘Robust’ Recovery – an IT Manager’s Dream

Carter Machinery, a Caterpillar dealer with over 60 years in business and a network of 20 locations and 1,200 employees, was struggling with a fragmented backup environment. Backups from 17 sites were replicated to corporate and written to tape via Backup Exec and an Overland device, but the team routinely missed the backup window and faced unreliable tape restores and capacity headaches.

Carter installed an ExaGrid appliance that worked with their existing Backup Exec jobs, added deduplication, and removed tape from nightly workflows. The result: backup windows shrank by 88% (from 24 hours to under 3), restores became simple enough to delegate to help desk staff, tape-related failures disappeared, and the IT team regained more than three person-days per month while avoiding costly cloud bandwidth upgrades.

Carter Machinery

Bill Durham

Information Systems Manager