Case Study: City of Kentwood achieves faster, tape-free backups and 10:1 deduplication with ExaGrid

City of Kentwood Modernizes Backups with ExaGrid

The City of Kentwood, Michigan — a suburb of Grand Rapids serving about 45,000 residents — faced growing backup challenges for its 270-user municipal IT environment, including police/fire video and sewer system footage. The IT team relied on LTO tape, snapshots and shadow copies that left many systems under-protected, required a costly tape refresh, and produced long, unreliable backup windows (jobs once ran from 5:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.); the city wanted a disk-based solution with deduplication and a 30-day retention.

Kentwood deployed an ExaGrid disk-based system with post-process, byte-level deduplication (working alongside NetApp), achieving an average dedupe ratio of 10:1 and dramatically higher throughput. Backups now run faster and five jobs can run concurrently, eliminating tape, saving roughly five IT hours per week and about $12,000 per year, while providing scalable capacity, reliable restores and highly rated vendor support.

City of Kentwood

Bill Dudgeon

Information Systems Manager