Case Study: Gates Chili Central School District achieves faster, lower-cost, simplified backups with ExaGrid

Gates Chili School District Learns to Streamline Backups

Gates Chili Central School District, serving about 5,500 students across seven schools in Gates and Chili, NY, struggled with an aging, manual tape-based backup process for nearly 30 servers across nine buildings. IT staff were overwhelmed by daily tape handling, long and unreliable backup windows (45 minutes to 8–9 hours), and budget constraints that made a traditional disk-based upgrade cost-prohibitive.

The district deployed an ExaGrid disk-based target that works with their existing Symantec Backup Exec, using byte-level delta data reduction to cut storage needs and costs significantly versus a straight SATA solution. With roughly half their servers already on ExaGrid, backups are now automated and complete in about 2–3 hours, restores are much faster and simpler, and overall management and costs have been greatly reduced.

Gates Chili Central School District

Phil Jay

Manager of IT Operations