Case Study: CIHR Canadian HIV Trials Network achieves dramatic reduction in backup times and nightly-completed backups with ExaGrid

CIHR Canadian HIV Trials Network Dramatically Reduces Backup Times with ExaGrid and Veeam

The CIHR Canadian HIV Trials Network (CTN) is a national partnership of clinicians, researchers, industry and people living with HIV that runs clinical trials and is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. CTN was struggling with backups of Linux, Oracle, Windows and Exchange servers that were written to tape and ran continuously — there simply wasn’t enough time in the day to complete backups — and needed a budget‑friendly, reliable solution that fit its publicly funded constraints.

CTN evaluated several vendors and implemented an ExaGrid disk‑based system paired with Veeam for its 100% virtualized environment; ExaGrid’s post‑process, zone‑level deduplication combined with Veeam’s source‑side dedupe reduced storage needs and WAN usage. The installation was quick, backups that once ran nonstop now finish overnight in a few hours, offsite replication supports disaster recovery, and the team gained a low‑maintenance, cost‑effective solution that provides reliable, automated backup completion.

Canadian HIV Trials Network

Joey Castro

Systems Administrator