Case Study: Webster Central School District achieves major cost savings and faster backups with ExaGrid

Webster Central School District Adds up Cost Savings with ExaGrid Disk-Based Backups

Webster Central School District, a suburban New York district serving about 9,000 students across 11 schools, was backing up roughly 4,000 PCs and nearly 40 servers to a 24‑slot tape library. Rapid data growth left IT staff burdened with daily tape rotation and long backup windows, and the district relied on Windows shadow copies for recovery—an approach that exposed them to disaster‑recovery risk and high management costs.

WCSD deployed a dual‑site ExaGrid disk‑based backup system with post‑process data deduplication that integrates with Symantec Backup Exec. The change cut tape reliance and management time dramatically, reduced full backup windows from nearly 24 hours to about two hours, and maximized retention on far less disk through deduplication (10:1–50:1). The scalable solution improved recovery readiness, reduced costs, and quickly paid for itself.

Webster Central School District

Quentin Spiegel

Senior Network Technician