Case Study: Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada achieves faster, scalable backups and reliable disaster recovery with ExaGrid

Disk Backup With Deduplication: The Remedy for Backup and DR Woes at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada

The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, a national medical education body based in Ottawa with a 33‑member IT team supporting over 42,000 specialists, was struggling with an unreliable, sequential tape-based backup process. Monthly backups could run from Saturday morning until Monday noon, restores were slow or impossible due to missing or damaged tapes, and the College needed better replication and scalability for disaster recovery as data volumes grew.

The College deployed a two-site ExaGrid disk-based system that integrates with its existing Symantec BackupExec and CA ARCserve workflows. ExaGrid’s post‑process deduplication writes data directly to disk, stores only changes (reducing storage 10:1 to 50:1), and replicates deltas between sites—enabling simultaneous jobs, much faster backups and restores, easy access to months of history, reduced tape costs and management overhead, and a scalable GRID architecture with responsive vendor support.

Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada

Christian Monette

Senior Network and Security Administrator