ExaGrid Grows State, Local Government and Education Customer Base

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. continues to expand the number of its state and local government and education (SLED) customers for its disk backup solutions. ExaGrid improves the speed and reliability of backups as well as ease of management, and the company offers a variety of flexible purchasing options and special pricing to meet the constraints of tight IT budgets.

ExaGrid is available through the federal General Services Administration schedule, has been available to customers via multiple state contracts, and is now on the New York State Contract of approved IT vendors, making it simple for ExaGrid’s nationwide network of resellers to offer a variety of discounts and special pricing options important to SLED organizations.

A snapshot of SLED customers
Located in Massachusetts, the Town of Brookline is home to nearly 60,000 residents. The IT department for the Town of Brookline supports the school systems, public safety and town administration departments with nearly 1,600 computers and over 50 servers. The town was quickly outgrowing its incumbent tape library, and weekly backups were prohibitively slow and were putting important data at risk. Since moving its backups to ExaGrid, the Town of Brookline’s IT team has reduced its backup windows from more than 48 hours to 12, and are better able to easily restore from data loss.

"Being a municipality, we had limited funds to spend on solutions to our tape backup woes," said Gary Vogler, IT network administrator for the Town of Brookline. "Other solutions we looked at were cost-prohibitive. We needed a disk backup system that could work with the backup application from Symantec we already had in place. ExaGrid was the ideal marriage of price and performance we needed. Since installation, we’ve seen a 70 percent reduction in backup time and I no longer have to worry about unreliable, underperforming tape backups."

Gates Chili School District in New York serves approximately 5000 students in seven schools in addition to its faculty and staff. To better manage the data demands for the district, the IT department needed to cost-effectively streamline its backup processes. Since the district installed the ExaGrid appliance, its backup window has shrunk and the IT department is now able to restore more quickly from a data disaster.

"We had been looking to move away from tape to a more reliable disk-based backup solution, but the cost was simply prohibitive until we found ExaGrid," said Phillip Jay, manager of IT operations, Gates Chili School District. "Our backups are more reliable and easier to restore, and the ExaGrid system seamlessly acts as a disk-based target for our existing Symantec Backup Exec software."

"Real-world applications of our technology and the results seen by government and education customers like the Town of Brookline and Gates Chili School District illustrate how ExaGrid’s industry-leading disk-based backup with deduplication relieves common pain-points of traditional backup in the mid-market and small enterprise," said Marc Crespi, VP of Product Management of ExaGrid Systems, Inc. "Beyond delivering the most scalable, highest performance backup systems to our customers across all industries, ExaGrid also offers our customers rapid deployment in existing environments and ease of ongoing system management."

ExaGrid disk backup systems are designed to meet the needs of companies backing-up between 1TB and 100TBs of data. ExaGrid’s approach to disk-based backup delivers performance and scalability without requiring costly forklift upgrades as data grows. ExaGrid customers achieve fast backup times because data is written directly to disk and data deduplication is performed post-process after the data is stored. In addition, ExaGrid’s GRID scalability enables organizations to store up to a 100TB full backup plus retention. Performance scales with data growth since processing power, memory, and bandwidth are added along with storage capacity, and data loads are automatically balanced across all servers.