City of Aurora, CO Replaced Tape Backup With Disk-Based ExaGrid

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. announced that the City of Aurora, Colorado’s third largest city, has replaced its tape-based backups with its disk-based backup storage system.

The City chose ExaGrid due to a variety of features and benefits, including: 

• Scale-out architecture eliminates the need for forklift upgrades
• Adaptive data deduplication minimizes data footprint to maximize storage capacity
• Trade-in program allows the City to consolidate/upgrade appliances in the future; models of any size or age can be mixed and matched in a single system
• Offsite replication provides DR protection

While still using tape-based backups, the City’s backup windows were running longer than 24 hours, so backup jobs had to be staggered and sometimes even cut. Since installing ExaGrid, backup windows have shortened and making tape copies no longer affects the production system as it did in the past.

In addition to the City’s constant challenge with its backup window, its IT staff particularly struggled with restoring user files and databases.

“Identifying and locating the correct tape(s) took time, and if it had already been sent to offsite storage, retrieving it was time consuming,” said Danny Santee, the City’s enterprise systems supervisor. “The whole process was cumbersome and tedious. Restoring a user file could take up to three days with tape, whereas with ExaGrid, the time it takes from receiving the request to restoring the data is about half an hour. The management of restores has been where we’ve seen our biggest gain, especially when it comes to restoring SQL data.“

City of Aurora customer story.