Case Study: California Emergency Management Agency (Cal EMA) achieves 75% reduction in backup data and cuts backup window from 20 to 5 hours with Quantum Corporation's vmPRO software

Cal EMA - Customer Case Study

California Emergency Management Agency (Cal EMA) faced growing strain on its backup infrastructure as it consolidated decades of archived data and virtualized production workloads. Full snapshots of the VMware environment would require roughly 15–20 TB and nightly backups took about 20 hours, creating heavy I/O and network load that degraded production performance and threatened service levels for this statewide emergency‑services agency.

Cal EMA deployed Quantum’s vmPRO virtual appliance integrated with its existing IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and tape systems; vmPRO’s Progressive Optimization filters out inactive, unassigned and deleted data so TSM can back up a native file‑system view of VMs. The result: a 75% reduction in backed‑up virtual data, backup windows shortened from ~20 hours to under 5 hours, TSM deduplication and archiving fully leveraged, improved operational service levels, and significant cost savings by avoiding separate proxy storage, agents and a second backup system.

Cal EMA

Lovell Hopper

Manager, Infrastructure Services