Case Study: Health New England achieves faster backups, extended retention and improved disaster recovery with ExaGrid

Health New England Enhances DR with Cross-Replicating ExaGrid Systems

Health New England (HNE), a Massachusetts HMO serving over 122,000 members, faced rising SAN costs, limited retention and slow restores because it lacked data deduplication and needed better disaster-recovery replication. The IT team wanted a disk-based backup solution that would reduce storage growth, extend retention beyond a single day, and simplify offsite DR.

HNE deployed a two-site ExaGrid system tightly integrated with Symantec Backup Exec (using OST) so primary backups are stored onsite and efficiently replicated offsite. ExaGrid’s post-process deduplication and landing-zone approach delivered average dedupe ratios of 15:1–20:1 (peaking at 44:1), extended retention from one day to several weeks, sped up backups and restores versus tape, simplified management, and provided scalable, supported DR capabilities.

Health New England

Dave Lewis

LAN Administrator