Case Study: Keene State College achieves faster, more reliable backups and major time savings with ExaGrid

Keene State College Chooses ExaGrid as Cornerstone of Backup Strategy

Keene State College, a public liberal arts institution in New Hampshire with about 5,700 students, faced slow, unreliable backups—large file servers and databases took up to a week to back up, jobs often failed, and the IT team spent many hours managing tape- and direct-attached storage-based backups. The college wanted to shorten backup windows, improve reliability, and reduce the time staff spent on backup administration.

Keene State deployed an ExaGrid disk-based backup system with post-process data deduplication working with Symantec Backup Exec. After implementation, full backups dropped from seven days to about 12 hours and incremental backups from 20 hours to roughly one hour; deduplication ratios reached as high as 25:1. The solution was quick to set up, scalable for future DR needs, reduced weekly backup administration from about 20 hours to 45 minutes, and significantly improved restore confidence and overall reliability.

Keene State College

Michelle Wood

Director of IT