Case Study: Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) achieves up to 107:1 deduplication and 1-hour backups with ExaGrid

DART Chooses ExaGrid for Backup, Achieves Deduplication Ratios for Oracle Exports of up to 107:1

Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART), which moves over 220,000 passengers daily across a 700-square-mile service area, was struggling with tape-based backups for a largely virtualized environment and a “keep forever” retention policy. Long, unpredictable backup windows (Oracle jobs could run as long as 55 hours), rising tape costs and retention logistics threatened capacity and recovery SLAs.

DART implemented ExaGrid’s disk-based backup with Veeam and cross-replication to a DR site, gaining fast landing-zone writes and adaptive deduplication. The change cut backup windows dramatically (Oracle exports now complete in about one hour), delivered deduplication ratios up to 107:1 (21 TB of Oracle data consuming ~200 GB), eliminated roughly 80 TB of weekly tape usage, increased backup frequency, and improved restore performance and support responsiveness.

DART

Kristopher Mendoza

Enterprise System Engineer