Case Study: First State Bank achieves faster, more reliable backups and greater data retention with ExaGrid

First State Bank Gains Better Backups with ExaGrid

First State Bank, a community bank based in St. Clair Shores, MI with ~180 employees and 11 branches, needed to replace a mix of backup devices and address growing retention challenges. The IT team wanted a unified, disk‑based solution (ruling out tape) that would simplify operations, improve backup windows, and support virtual, SQL, Exchange and file server protection.

They deployed a two‑site ExaGrid system that integrates with Symantec Backup Exec and vRanger, using post‑process byte‑level deduplication and replication to a co‑location site. The result: streamlined nightly backups (differentials complete in a few hours, fulls within 12 hours), dramatically faster restores, increased retention thanks to 10:1–50:1 dedupe ratios, easy modular scalability, and simpler management with strong vendor support.

First State Bank

Jeff Koch

Network Administrator, First State Bank