Case Study: North Kingstown School Department achieves fast, reliable backups and eliminates tape with ExaGrid

North Kingstown School Department Earns an “A” for Better Backups with ExaGrid

North Kingstown School Department is a K–12 district in Rhode Island with eight schools and about 4,400 students. Their centralized backup strategy—full backups weekly and incrementals daily—had outgrown the tape library, causing backups to stretch beyond 30 hours, slow the network, and miss backup windows. They investigated alternatives (including a SAN) but needed efficient data reduction rather than repeatedly storing full copies.

The district deployed an ExaGrid system that integrated with their existing Symantec Backup Exec and tape library, and was up and running in about 20 minutes. ExaGrid’s post-process byte-level deduplication dramatically reduced storage needs, cut backup times to a few hours, and lowered admin time from roughly five hours per week to 30 minutes. The solution is scalable and supports future replication to a second site to further reduce reliance on tape, with strong vendor support throughout.

North Kingstown School Department

Richard Booth

Network Manager