Case Study: The Salvation Army achieves faster backups and eliminates tape with ExaGrid

The Salvation Army Improves Backup Times and Eliminates Tape with ExaGrid

The Salvation Army’s eastern territory headquarters in West Nyack, NY — part of a nationwide nonprofit serving millions — was struggling with long backup windows and growing tape-management burdens. Full backups were running through the night and into the workday, tape counts and offsite transport were increasing as data grew, and IT had little time for maintenance or upgrades.

The agency deployed a two-site ExaGrid disk-based backup system (West Nyack and Syracuse) with post-process deduplication and nightly replication, replacing tape entirely. Backups now typically run from about 7:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m., retention has been extended (weekly backups kept four weeks, monthly six months), and the GRID architecture provides easy scalability and improved restore performance with vendor support.

The Salvation Army

Michael Levine

Technology Research & Assessment Manager Salvation Army, Eastern Territory