Case Study: Northeast Metro 916 Intermediate School District achieves dramatically reduced backup windows and up to 53:1 data deduplication with ExaGrid

Northeast Metro 916 Intermediate School District Does Its Homework on Disk-Based Backup and Data Deduplication and Chooses ExaGrid

Northeast Metro 916 Intermediate School District, based in White Bear Lake, MN, provides shared services to area school districts and was responsible for backing up roughly 1 TB of data per week (including document imaging for three member districts). Their tape-based process was manual, slow (backups often ran from Friday evening to late Sunday), and suffered retention and reliability problems—prompting the IT team to seek a disk-based, Backup Exec–compatible solution.

They deployed a two-site ExaGrid disk backup system with post-process, byte-level deduplication. Installation was quick (about an hour) and the system cut the backup window from a weekend to about eight hours, eliminated tape costs, and reduced administration work. ExaGrid delivered average deduplication of 17:1 (up to 53:1 for some file types), remote monitoring/support, and scalable capacity for future growth.

Northeast Metro 916 Intermediate School District

Yvonne Anderson

Supervisor of Information Systems