Case Study: Victor O. Schinnerer & Company achieves dramatically faster, scalable backups and improved disaster recovery with ExaGrid

Underwriter Ensures More Efficient Backups with ExaGrid

Victor O. Schinnerer & Company, a leading underwriting manager handling roughly $500M in premiums, 46,000 policies and a network of 9,600 brokers, was struggling with explosive data growth from new applications, virtualization and expanded imaging. Their tape-based backups (and a SAN front-end) could not keep up—backup windows grew beyond weekends and virtual snapshot backups were increasingly difficult.

Schinnerer deployed a two-site ExaGrid disk-based backup system with Symantec NetBackup, using post-process deduplication and nightly replication between sites. The change delivered dedupe ratios typically 12:1–16:1 (peaking at 25:1), allowed their backup volume to grow from 2TB to 24TB while keeping the same backup window that previously took >48 hours, sped restores (including remote full-system restores), reduced reliance on tape, and provided easy scalability and proactive support.

Victor O. Schinnerer & Company

Michael Horan

Systems Engineer, Victor O. Schinnerer & Co.