Case Study: Leavitt Group achieves reliable, scalable backups and a 30% shorter backup window with ExaGrid

Leavitt Group Replaces Unreliable NAS, Stabilizes Backups by Pairing Veeam with ExaGrid

Leavitt Group, a large independent U.S. insurance brokerage with roughly 800 VMs and nearly a petabyte of annual backup data, was struggling with an unreliable QNAP NAS that repeatedly failed drives, couldn’t handle the backup load, and forced impractical workarounds (like limiting backups to 25 VMs at a time). The unstable device and lack of deduplication caused capacity and performance problems that prevented the company from completing nightly backups within its required window.

Leavitt installed an ExaGrid appliance tightly integrated with Veeam, removing the Linux/NFS middleman and adding zone-level deduplication and scale-out storage. The new solution delivered an average dedupe ratio of 8:1 (storing ~1PB on ~230TB), cut the nightly backup window from 10 to 7 hours (≈30% reduction), enabled reliable offsite replication and faster restores/instant recoveries, and removed the need to “babysit” backups—letting Leavitt plan to extend retention to three years.

Leavitt Group

Derrick Rose

IT Operations Engineer