Case Study: Westmont College achieves fast, reliable backups and massive storage savings with ExaGrid

ExaGrid Makes the Grade at Westmont College

Westmont College, a residential liberal arts school in Santa Barbara with nearly 1,400 students, was struggling with an aging IT infrastructure: disk-to-disk-to-tape backups were slow, unreliable and often took more than 24 hours to complete, requiring a full day each week of staff time to manage. After hiring its first CIO, the college sought a scalable, dependable alternative that would eliminate tape and stabilize nightly backups.

Westmont deployed an ExaGrid disk-based backup system with Symantec NetBackup, using post-process, zone-level deduplication. The solution was installed in a few hours, delivered average deduplication of 18.5:1, cut backup windows to under 10 hours, and reduced weekly backup administration from a full day to about five minutes, while offering GRID scalability to meet future growth.

Westmont College

Reed Sheard

Vice President and CIO