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Ipswich BC is a regional centre for business, culture, entertainment and sport and has more than 130,000 residents. To support the Council’s 70 IT applications, the council’s IT department is responsible for an IT infrastructure that includes 130 servers across the IT and telephone network. These applications create vast quantities of data that needs to be backed up on a daily basis and stored in a secure environment. As the quantity of data grew, Ipswich BC found that its tape based backup systems were simply not able to cope with demand.

In fact the load on the seven tape drives meant that a daily backup was taking 23.5 hours to complete. This meant that there was only a 30 minute window before the next backup was due to commence. The weekly backups would take all weekend. On many occasions the backups exceeded the available time window and had to be terminated.

As a result the team at Ipswich BC knew they either needed to buy another tape drive or move to a new solution. With long backup and restore times, tape management issues causing problems on a daily basis and with what is practically an obsolete technology in situ, Ipswich BC decided to cope with future demand by adding a disk-based backup system.

Ipswich BC selected the ExaGrid system. ExaGrid’s GRID computing software makes the system highly scalable, and when plugged into a switch, different sized configurations can be mixed and matched into a single GRID system with capacities of up to a 60TB full backup plus retention. When virtualized, they appear as a single system to the backup server, and load balancing of all data across servers is automatic.

ExaGrid combines last backup compression along with data deduplication, which only stores changes from backup to backup instead of storing full file copies.