Case Study: CSEA (Civil Service Employees Association) achieves scalable, fast backups and rapid restores with ExaGrid

Scalable ExaGrid System Helps Union Meet Growing Backup Requirements

The Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA), a statewide union representing about 220,000 members, needed to replace its tape-based backups as it moved toward virtualization. Tape required heavy daily maintenance, long restore times and limited scalability, so IT sought a disk-based solution that would work with existing backup software (EMC NetWorker and Veeam) and keep backup windows manageable as data grew.

CSEA deployed ExaGrid’s GRID-based appliances, scaling the system twice by adding nodes as needed. Post-process deduplication (about 12:1) and a landing-zone approach cut nightly backups to under 13 hours, reduced restore times from hours to minutes, simplified management with an intuitive interface, and delivered predictable scalability and strong vendor support—allowing CSEA to confidently expand capacity as data volumes increase.

CSEA

Patricia Neal

Production Support Specialist