Cross Country Home Services Selects ExaGrid

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. announced Cross Country Home Services (CCHS) chose ExaGrid to improve the speed and reliability of backups. CCHS moved from their previous tape backup to a faster, more reliable and more easily managed disk-based solution from ExaGrid, and now provides even higher levels of data protection for critical customer information.

With more than 25 years of experience, CCHS works with companies to drive revenue and customer loyalty through a set of home warranties, home service plans and homeowner emergency assistance programs. As with most businesses, CCHS has experienced rapid data growth in recent years, and currently manages data at three separate locations, all of which now use ExaGrid’s disk-based backup with deduplication.

"Before we implemented ExaGrid our backups took more than 12 hours each night, and recovery could take nearly 30 hours. We’re now executing nightly backups across three separate data centers in less than four hours and our restores take minutes," said Chuck Matulik, Senior Manager of Network, Systems and Telecom for Cross Country Home Services. "We knew we needed a fast, reliable disk-based solution that fit with our new Symantec backup environment and fit our budget, and ExaGrid was the best choice for our business."

CCHS evaluated Data Domain in their search for a new backup solution, but found ExaGrid’s technology was superior and pricing more cost-effective. ExaGrid’s faster performance for backups and restores using post-process deduplication, streamlined management of backups from multiple applications, GRID scalability, and price-point ultimately made the decision an easy one for CCHS. Among the key technical advantages of ExaGrid for the IT team at CCHS was the ability to quickly restore from the last full backup copy, which available at all times in a non-deduplicated form in the ExaGrid appliance landing zone.

"Since our inception, we’ve helped companies and IT departments just like Cross Country Homes Services overcome the many challenges of legacy tape based systems," said Marc Crespi, VP of Product Management for ExaGrid. "The ExaGrid system – especially when compared to our competitors – delivers the speed and reliability benefits of backing up to disk at nearly the same cost of tape backup systems. It’s this combination of performance, scalability, and price that keeps our customers happy."

CCHS learned about the ExaGrid system through value-added reseller, Syscom Technologies. Frank Politano, Syscom Technologies, recommended the ExaGrid system to CCHS for its price and performance.

"We strive to provide best-of-breed technologies to our customers, and in this case, we knew ExaGrid’s disk-based backup with deduplication would resolve the pain points of CCHS’ backup strategy, while fitting within their budget," said Bernard Westwood, CFO at Syscom Technologies. "We continue to seek innovative partner companies like ExaGrid who offer leading technologies that scale with changing business needs. Partnerships like this let us provide significant business value to our customers."

ExaGrid disk backup systems are designed to meet the needs of companies backing-up between 1TB and 100TBs of data. ExaGrid’s unique approach to disk-based backup delivers unparalleled performance and scalability without requiring costly forklift upgrades as data grows. ExaGrid customers achieve fastest 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.