Case Study: State College of Florida achieves a shorter backup window and halved backup times with ExaGrid

State College of Florida Virtualizes Infrastructure, Turns to ExaGrid to Shorten Backup Window

State College of Florida (SCF), a regional public college serving tens of thousands of students, saw its data volumes explode after virtualizing much of its infrastructure. The existing tape library couldn’t keep up, expanding backup windows and consuming IT staff time—backup management had become nearly a full‑time job.

SCF deployed an ExaGrid disk‑based backup system (working with Dell vRanger for VMs and Symantec Backup Exec for physical servers), which cut Exchange backups from 15 to 7 hours and many smaller server jobs from about 8 hours to 1 hour. Post‑process deduplication delivered ratios up to 18:1 for greater retention, restores became much faster than tape, daily admin time dropped from roughly 75% to minutes, and the GRID architecture plus proactive support lets the system scale as data grows.

State College of Florida

Jackie Hemmerich

Network Administrator