Case Study: Heil Trailer International achieves faster, more efficient backups and restores with ExaGrid

Heil Trailer Moves Backups to ExaGrid to Gain Faster Backups and Restores

Heil Trailer International, a global manufacturer of tank and specialty trailers, was struggling with rapid data growth that had outstripped its tape backup system. Backups ran around the clock, causing network congestion, ERP performance degradation, tape reliability and availability problems, and slow, unreliable restores — all while operations ran 24 hours a day, six days a week with no downtime for maintenance.

Heil deployed two ExaGrid disk-based backup appliances (primary and a disaster-recovery site 45 miles away) to work with its existing Symantec Backup Exec. ExaGrid’s byte-level, post-process deduplication delivered 50–60:1 reduction, cut full backup windows from ~24 hours to under 12 hours (with incremental backups often taking an hour), dramatically sped restores, eliminated tape handling, simplified SOX compliance, saved about eight staff hours per week, and provided scalable, bandwidth-efficient replication at a total cost comparable to tape over three years.

Heil Trailer International

David Duggan

Global Network Manager