Case Study: Alabama Alcoholic Beverage Control Board achieves faster, automated backups and improved disaster recovery with ExaGrid

The Alabama Alcoholic Beverage Control Board Automates Backup Processes, Improves Disaster Recovery with ExaGrid

The Alabama Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, which manages liquor distribution, retail stores, licensing and tax collection for the state, struggled with slow, unreliable tape backups across two networks—one of which handles PCI-sensitive retail credit-card data. Nightly tape processes were time consuming and cumbersome (including offsite tape transport that required law enforcement escorts), making consistent backups and disaster recovery difficult.

The Board implemented a two-site ExaGrid disk-based deduplication system integrated with Symantec Backup Exec, with primary appliances in the main datacenter and replicated secondaries at the disaster recovery site. ExaGrid’s post-process deduplication (up to 59:1 for SharePoint) and direct-to-disk backups cut backup windows from ~11 hours to about 3 hours, enabled concurrent jobs, reduced reliance on tape, simplified management, and improved scalability and disaster recovery.

Alabama Alcoholic Beverage Control Board

Chad Holton

Network Administrator