Case Study: Wright-Pierce achieves lower costs and simplified, faster backups with NetApp AltaVault

Wright-Pierce Finds NetApp AltaVault Solution and Amazon S3 Data Storage Cost Less and Easier To Maintain Than Disk-To-Disk Options

Wright-Pierce is an employee-owned, award-winning engineering firm with 200 staff across seven offices whose rapid growth generated steadily increasing volumes of CAD, GIS, LIDAR and aerial photography data. Their legacy tape system became obsolete and the ExaGrid disk-to-disk solution proved costly to scale and unreliable after a hardware failure, prompting the IT team to seek a more secure, cost-effective backup approach.

They deployed NetApp AltaVault combined with Amazon S3 and kept their existing Backup Exec software, gaining deduplication, encryption, and a single rack appliance instead of four ExaGrids. The change cut monthly cloud costs (10 TB dropped from ~$700–800 to ~$300), reduced power and cooling (AltaVault uses about 20% of the power of four ExaGrids), simplified management, retired tape and archival NAS, and enabled minute‑level restores from cache with stronger overall data security.

Wright-Pierce

Ray Sirois

Director of IT