Case Study: CRISTA Ministries achieves faster, simpler backups and significant storage savings with ExaGrid

CRISTA Ministries Speeds Backups with ExaGrid

CRISTA Ministries, a Seattle-based not-for-profit operating seven independent ministries (schools, senior living, radio, camps and international relief), faced long backup windows and the operational burden of tape-based backups. Managing diverse environments with limited staff made backups slow, error-prone and time-consuming.

CRISTA deployed three ExaGrid disk-based appliances with Symantec Backup Exec, moving off tape to post-process deduplication and direct-to-disk backup. The result: dramatic space savings (215:1 deduplication for SQL, 37.7:1 overall), retaining 200TB of data in 5.2TB of disk, faster restores, six months of full backups on-site, simpler “set it and forget it” administration, strong vendor support, and scalable options for future replication.

CRISTA Ministries

Michael Kerrick

Manager of Servers and Networks