Case Study: Ipswich Borough Council achieves faster backups and 10-minute VMware recoveries with ExaGrid

Ipswich Borough Council Shortens Backup times, Speeds File Restores with ExaGrid

Ipswich Borough Council, the local government for a growing town of over 130,000 residents, was struggling with nightly tape backups that ran 23½ hours a day, suffered regular tape jams and failures, and produced slow, unreliable restores—especially for expanding VMware workloads. These operational issues left little room for error and frequently forced incomplete backups and lengthy recovery times.

The council deployed a two-site ExaGrid disk-based system integrated with Symantec Backup Exec—one appliance in the primary datacenter and a replicated appliance three miles away for DR. ExaGrid’s post-process deduplication delivered up to 61:1 compression for VMware images, cut backup times to within the backup window, doubled Exchange backups to twice daily, enabled VMware restores in about ten minutes (vs. half a day on tape), and eliminated tape handling and associated costs while providing scalable growth and responsive support.

Ipswich Borough Council

Howard Gaskin

IT Infrastructure Manager