Case Study: North Carolina Electric Membership Corporation achieves 30% faster backups and over five weeks retention with ExaGrid

North Carolina Electric Membership Corporation Powers Backup Processes with ExaGrid

North Carolina Electric Membership Corporation (NCEMC) supports 26 member-owned electric cooperatives and serves more than 950,000 customers across 93 counties (2.5 million North Carolinians across its family of organizations). Its IT team was backing up to disk but rapid data growth left only three days of retention, slow restores because data was still largely on tape, and an almost 23-hour full backup window—creating a need for greater retention, faster restores, and reduced reliance on tape.

NCEMC deployed ExaGrid’s disk-based, post-process deduplication appliance to work with its existing CA ARCserve backups. The result: full backups dropped from 23 to 14 hours (at least a 30% improvement), retention grew to over five weeks with deduplication ratios as high as 670:1 for static data, and the organization plans a second ExaGrid for DR that should cut tape costs by about 75% and dramatically reduce administration time.

North Carolina Electric Membership Corporation

Steve Qualley

Sr. Systems Engineer