Case Study: Jackson County Intermediate School District achieves faster backups and massive storage reduction with ExaGrid

Jackson County Intermediate School District Gives ExaGrid’s Disk-Based Backup and Deduplication System an A+

Jackson County Intermediate School District (JCISD) is a Michigan educational service agency that supports the IT needs of local school districts. Rapid growth left JCISD’s SAN-based backups maxed at 9 TB, limiting retention to about 14 days and forcing backups to run from Friday evening into Monday morning—an unsustainable situation as data retention needs expanded across nine school districts.

JCISD implemented an ExaGrid disk-based backup and deduplication system that worked with their existing Symantec Backup Exec, was easy to install, and scaled with their growth. Backups now complete in hours instead of days; about 49 TB of data is stored as roughly 3 TB after deduplication, the former 9 TB SAN capacity was reclaimed for general use, retention moved from 14 days to quarterly (with plans for a year), and restores are faster and simpler.

Jackson County Intermediate School District

Greg Wade

Network Engineer