Case Study: Dynamic Aviation achieves fast, reliable disk backups and instant VM restores with ExaGrid

Dynamic Aviation Finds Tape Backups Just Won’t Fly Anymore

Dynamic Aviation, a 75‑year‑old provider of specialized aviation services, was struggling with a legacy tape backup setup using a single Symantec Backup Exec tape drive. Slow write speeds and a long backup window meant only the highest‑priority data could be backed up (often over an entire weekend), retention was limited, and the IT team had to rely on shadow copies—putting the organization at risk of serious data loss.

They replaced tape with an ExaGrid disk‑based, scale‑out GRID appliance and paired it with Veeam for virtual server protection. The solution’s landing zone and post‑process deduplication delivered much faster backups (minutes vs. hours) and VM restores in seconds, while dedupe reduced storage significantly (about 19:1 on file storage, ~5.25:1 for Exchange, and 6.4–9.7:1 for SQL). Installation was painless, support responsive, and the architecture eliminated future forklift upgrades while minimizing WAN bandwidth for replication.

Dynamic Aviation

Andrew Powell

IT Manager