Case Study: Commonwealth of Massachusetts IT Division achieves faster backups and rapid restores with ExaGrid

Massachusetts Division of Health Care Finance and Policy Speeds Backups and Restores with Costeffective ExaGrid System

The Massachusetts Division of Health Care Finance and Policy, which analyzes and advises on state health care financing, struggled with long backup windows, cumbersome tape management and slow restores—full backups routinely ran from Friday night into Tuesday or Wednesday and nightly incrementals ran through the following morning. Attempts to back up to disk then tape without deduplication consumed large amounts of storage, made restores difficult, and cost about $14,000 per year in tape-related expenses.

The Division deployed an ExaGrid disk-based backup system (working with Symantec Backup Exec) that uses post-process deduplication; it cost less than half of an alternative solution and delivered a 15:1 overall deduplication rate and 30:1 for SQL. Resulting benefits included nearly eliminating tape usage and associated costs, reducing full-backup time by about three days (3 TB file server backups now finish by Sunday night), and dramatically faster restores (two SQL databases of 30 GB and 10 GB restored in 30 minutes); the system was also quick to install and supported by ExaGrid engineers.

Commonwealth of Massachusetts IT Division

Mike Regan

Senior Network Analyst