Case Study: Penfield Central School District reduces backup window from 34 to 12 hours and enables instant VM restores with ExaGrid

ExaGrid and Veeam Streamline Penfield Central School District’s Backup and Recovery Operations

Penfield Central School District, a suburban Rochester, NY district serving about 4,500 K–12 students across six schools, struggled with slow, costly disk-based backups after moving off tape. Their NAS-based solution consumed excessive disk space and produced a 34-hour backup window, so they sought a faster, more reliable, and more cost-effective approach.

By deploying ExaGrid alongside Veeam in their fully virtualized environment, Penfield leveraged Veeam’s source-side deduplication plus ExaGrid’s zone-level dedupe and GRID architecture. The result: backups shrank dramatically, the backup window fell to 12 hours, jobs run reliably 24/7 with no failures, VM restores (including Instant VM Recovery) are fast and require no rehydration, and installation and scaling proved simple.

Penfield Central School

Michael DiLalla

Sr. Network Technician, Penfield Central School District