Case Study: Catawba Valley Community College achieves instant VM recoveries and reliable disaster recovery with ExaGrid

Community College Gets Instant VM Recoveries with Veeam and ExaGrid

Catawba Valley Community College (CVCC), a public community college in Hickory, NC, experienced a major data loss when aging two-node VMware hardware became unrecoverable. That incident prompted the IT team to replace a spotty backup strategy and find a reliable solution that would provide fast, dependable recovery and disaster‑recovery protection.

CVCC implemented Veeam Backup & Recovery with ExaGrid as the disk-based backup target; Veeam’s source-side deduplication combined with ExaGrid’s zone-level dedupe and landing‑zone cache delivers fast backups and efficient storage. Using Veeam Instant VM Recovery, the college can run VMs directly from the ExaGrid appliance if primary storage fails, restore VMs back when systems are repaired, and complete backups quickly (their Hyper‑V cluster backs up in under six hours). Strong vendor support and ExaGrid’s scalable GRID architecture have given CVCC greater confidence in its DR posture and room to grow.

Catawba Valley Community College

Paul Watkins

IT Manager