Case Study: Clifton Gunderson achieves faster, scalable backups and reduced tape costs with ExaGrid

Clifton Gunderson Counts on ExaGrid for More Efficient Backups

Clifton Gunderson, a national CPA and consulting firm with more than 2,000 professionals across 45 offices, faced rapidly growing data (78% year-over-year) and strained tape-based backups across two datacenters. Their tape libraries were at capacity, restores were slow and costly—incurring $220/hour in colocation labor—and IT needed a scalable, remotely manageable solution to reduce tape reliance.

The firm deployed two 20 TB ExaGrid disk-based appliances (one per datacenter) working with Veritas NetBackup, with local backups and cross-site replication. Post-process deduplication and a scale-out GRID architecture delivered much faster backups and restores, eliminated most tape use (now only monthly/yearly), cut colocation and labor costs, shortened backup windows, and provided an easy path to scale for future growth.

Clifton Gunderson

Dave Treamer

Sr. Associate Storage Architect