University of Northern Iowa Saves Time, Increases Disaster Protection and Gains Scalability with ExaGrid’s Disk-Based Solution with Data Deduplication

WESTBOROUGH, Mass., August 30, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) – ExaGrid Systems, Inc., the leader in cost-effective and scalable disk backup solutions with data deduplication, today announced that it has published over 300 customer success stories, which can be found on the company’s website – making ExaGrid the first and only backup vendor to reach this impressive milestone, and only IT vendor with 300 published testimonials for a single product solution. These published stories combined with customer video testimonials comprise a library of published customer endorsements, which is larger than all competitors combined. This further underscores ExaGrid’s superior product capabilities, value delivered, customer support model, and commitment to customer satisfaction. Each two-page customer success story includes the person’s name, title, and a personal quote.

The University of Northern Iowa is the 300th customer to publicly share its selection of and success with ExaGrid’s disk backup with data deduplication solution. As a state-supported university of approximately 13,000 students, and ranked among the nation’s top 650 undergraduate colleges and universities in the Forbes’ 2011 annual ranking of top colleges, the university’s IT department understands the importance of maintaining records and data in a safe, secure and disaster resistant environment.

Prior to switching to ExaGrid, UNI had been backing up its data to a large, onsite magnetic tape library using a chargeback service model to the university system. The IT organization backed up data files, Oracle RMAN backups and Microsoft SQL backups for its clients using Symantec NetBackup, with an average of three months’ retention and the ability to restore the last 30 daily backups. With a goal of offering advanced services and increasing efficiency, the IT department needed to replicate data off-site for increased data protection. A recent reduction in IT personnel led UNI to realize its previous shuttling of tape to offsite locations was not possible. The IT department also realized that data stored at both locations could be lost in a disaster due to their proximity to one another. The university needed to send data offsite more frequently and move away from tape to improve business continuity.

After getting pricing from another vendor and discounting them due to ‘sticker shock,’ the IT department chose ExaGrid’s disk backup solution with deduplication because of the scalability of its GRID-based architecture, fast restores and price.

• With the university’s typical annual data growth rate at between 40-50 percent, the ExaGrid system offers the advantage of scaling capacity as data grows, avoiding costly forklift upgrades.
• With ExaGrid, UNI has saved time and internal resources by no longer having to manually send tapes offsite. UNI’s implementation of ExaGrid’s systems has also shortened its backup window, as the university is no longer limited by the number of tape drives it had as to how many different servers it could back up at once. The ExaGrid system has allowed UNI to increase the distance between its off-site copies and primary datacenters, while reducing the amount of effort that went into moving the data there. With ExaGrid, UNI’s IT team can run more backups simultaneously, allowing for increased efficiency due to shortened backup windows and faster restores.
• For UNI, another big advantage of choosing ExaGrid was that the university IT team could keep its existing NetBackup software for backing up files. Maintaining the existing software was a high priority due to its familiarity and ease of use. In addition, ExaGrid offered the capability of supporting backups using Oracle RMAN.

Supporting Quotes:

• Seth Bokelman, Senior Systems Administrator, University of Northern Iowa: “Our IT department is extremely satisfied with our decision to implement ExaGrid’s solutions. Compared to our previous tape system, which required a lot of “hand-holding” and personal monitoring by me, the ExaGrid system is like a huge weight off my shoulders, saving me time and making my job easier. With ExaGrid, there is no more coming in on weekends to swap out a bad tape drive, and no more worrying about having to be there when there is a tape drive failure. With ExaGrid, I can sleep easier at night knowing our backup jobs go are faster and are more reliable.”

• Bill Andrews, President and CEO of ExaGrid: “The UNI success story is fitting as our 300th published customer case study, as the university’s implementation highlights ExaGrid’s scalability, fast restores and superior price point over our primary competitor in the space. This company and industry milestone, serves as further proof of our commitment to customer satisfaction within the global marketplace. ExaGrid’s unmatched, broad range of customer endorsements can be attributed to our highly efficient performance, scalable GRID-based architecture and top-notch support. Customers are only willing to speak publicly if the product, customer support, and experience with the vendor are all top notch.”

About ExaGrid’s Technology:
The ExaGrid system is a plug-and-play disk backup appliance that works with existing backup applications and enables faster and more reliable backups and restores. Customers report that backup time is reduced by 30 to 90 percent over traditional tape backup. ExaGrid’s patented zone-level data deduplication technology and most recent backup compression reduces the amount of disk space needed by a range of 10:1 to as high as 50:1 or more, resulting in a cost comparable to traditional tape-based backup.

About ExaGrid Systems, Inc.:
ExaGrid offers the only disk-based backup appliance with data deduplication purpose-built for backup that leverages a unique architecture optimized for performance, scalability and price. The combination of post-process deduplication, most recent backup cache, and GRID scalability enables IT departments to achieve the shortest backup window and the fastest, most reliable restores and disaster recovery without backup window expansion or forklift upgrades as data grows. With offices and distribution worldwide, ExaGrid has more than 4,500 systems installed at more than 1,400 customers, and over 300 published customer success stories.