Case Study: City of Ft. Lauderdale achieves 50% faster backups with ExaGrid

City of Ft. Lauderdale Cuts Backup Times in Half with ExaGrid

The City of Fort Lauderdale, a municipality of nearly 180,000 residents, was struggling with nightly backups that often didn’t finish before the workday. Using an outdated tape drive and legacy backup software, the IT team—led by Jay Stacy—faced growing data volumes, backups that slowed the network, and incremental jobs that started at 10pm but sometimes had to be stopped when they ran past the allotted window.

The city deployed a two-site ExaGrid disk-based backup system with hardware, post-process data deduplication and Symantec Veritas NetBackup. This solution cut nightly backup times in half—full backups fell from nearly 48 hours to about 12—and enabled file restores in minutes instead of hours. The turnkey, scalable GRID appliance also reduced storage needs through deduplication, simplified management, and allowed the city to expand capacity as data grows.

City of Ft. Lauderdale

Jay Stacy

Manager, Technical Services