Case Study: Derrick Corporation achieves faster backups and near-instant restores with ExaGrid

Derrick Corporation Makes Backups and Restores More Efficient with ExaGrid

Derrick Corporation, a Buffalo, NY–based manufacturer of high-frequency vibrating machines and screen surfaces with about 300 employees, was struggling with long backup windows and the daily burden of tape management. Nightly incremental backups took 12–15 hours and weekly full backups stretched to 48 hours, consuming significant IT staff time and making restores slow and cumbersome.

Derrick deployed an ExaGrid disk-based backup system alongside Symantec Backup Exec, keeping monthly tape copies for disaster recovery. Incremental backups fell to about 5 hours and full backups to 12–20 hours, restores (including AutoCAD files) dropped from hours to seconds, and deduplication delivered strong savings (SQL 25.63:1, AutoCAD ~15.35:1) with over 16 weeks of retention — reducing tape costs by roughly $800/month and freeing staff time while providing scalable, supported DR options.

Derrick Corporation

Chris Firkins

Senior Network Administrator