Case Study: The Field Museum reduces backup window from weeks to days with ExaGrid

The Field Museum Reduces Backup Window from Weeks to Days with ExaGrid

The Field Museum in Chicago, a major natural history and research institution, was struggling with long backup windows and rising disk costs after moving off tape—full backups had taken two to three weeks on tape and, while disk improved speed, “disk sprawl” threatened to make growth cost‑prohibitive without deduplication.

The museum deployed ExaGrid (starting with one unit and expanding to five EX13000 systems) alongside CommVault Simpana, using ExaGrid’s post‑process, zone‑level deduplication to store only changes between backups. The result: full backups now complete in about three days with much faster restores, dramatically reduced storage, a smaller datacenter footprint and lower power/cooling needs, easy setup and strong vendor support, and scalable capacity for future growth.

The Field Museum

Mike Yoshida

Systems Engineer