Case Study: Thomas & King achieves 50% shorter backup windows and reliable, tape-free backups with ExaGrid

Thomas & King Serves Up Improved Backups with ExaGrid

Thomas & King, the eighth-largest restaurant franchise in the U.S. with over 7,500 employees operating 90 Applebee’s and seven Carino’s restaurants across five states, faced unreliable tape backups and lengthy weekend backup windows (26–30 hours). The IT team needed a solution to streamline day-to-day backups, improve disaster recovery, and eliminate the risk of failed restores from tape or SAN snapshot-only approaches.

Thomas & King deployed an ExaGrid disk-based backup system at an off-site data center (with a second-site planned) that works with their existing Symantec Backup Exec. The new setup cut the weekend backup window in half, dramatically reduced nightly windows, enabled nightly full backups and simpler operations, and leveraged ExaGrid’s byte-level deduplication (claimed up to 20:1) to lower storage and WAN costs—while the IT team praised the product’s ease of use and vendor support.

Thomas & King

Jonathan DeMesserman

Manager of Infrastructure Services