Case Study: Sarah Lawrence College achieves faster off-campus backups and reduced backup windows with ExaGrid

Sarah Lawrence College Moves Backups Off Campus with ExaGrid and Gains Faster Backups

Sarah Lawrence College, a small liberal arts institution near New York City, needed a faster, more reliable backup strategy when it planned to move its datacenter to an offsite co‑location. The IT team was frustrated with tape backups that produced weekend full backups of 24–36 hours and nightly differentials of about six hours, and wanted a disk‑to‑disk solution that would eliminate lengthy windows and avoid shipping tapes offsite.

The college deployed an ExaGrid appliance that works with its existing CA ARCserve backup software and uses post‑process, byte‑level deduplication to shrink storage needs and write directly to disk. As a result full backups dropped to 10–12 hours and nightly differentials to under two hours, the datacenter move was accelerated by migrating VMware images via ExaGrid, tape reliance was greatly reduced, and the system provides scalable capacity and replication options for future growth.

Sarah Lawrence College

Sean Jameson

Director of Information Technology