Case Study: Greater Southern Tier BOCES achieves faster backups and improved retention with ExaGrid

Greater Southern Tier BOCES Meets Goals by Improving Retention and Backup Times with ExaGrid

Greater Southern Tier BOCES, which provides shared programs and IT services to 21 school districts in New York, was struggling with tape-based backups for roughly 15 TB of weekly data. Long backup windows (about 70 hours), heavy tape use, and difficulty meeting its desired 3–8 week retention policies were creating operational and storage challenges.

The district deployed an ExaGrid disk-based backup appliance with post-process deduplication alongside Symantec Backup Exec. The solution delivered average deduplication of 15:1, cut the weekly full backup window from ~70 to 48 hours, produced much faster restores, and allowed the organization to meet or exceed retention targets; installation was quick (<2 hours), administration is low-touch, and support and scalability have been strong.

Greater Southern Tier BOCES

Glenn Hanratty

Network Administrator