Case Study: CIPD achieves scalable, manageable disk backups and 3-month retention with ExaGrid

CIPD Chooses ExaGrid for System Scalability and Manageability of Backup

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), a professional body for over 130,000 HR and people-development professionals, was struggling to manage large nightly backups—up to 40 TB full backups—relying on roughly 24 tapes a day (about 750 tapes/month). Tape-based backups limited daily full backups, reduced retention from the target three months to under two, complicated VMware protection, and made DR tests slow and labor-intensive.

CIPD deployed ExaGrid disk-based appliances (three EX13000E units—two onsite and one at the DR site) to work with its NetBackup environment, benefiting from ExaGrid’s landing‑zone architecture and post‑write deduplication (CIPD sees ~20:1). The change eliminated tape handling and custom workarounds, restored three-month daily retention, enabled fast restores and VM recoveries, simplified management, improved inter-site replication for DR, and delivered better cost and scalability.

CIPD

Mark Boardman

Infrastructure Manager