Trucking company moves from tape to disk-based backup

This Best Practice is part of a collection of advice provided by information technology professionals on how they have solved various challenges, and addressed IT priorities within their organizations.

Who provided this information:
Gary Larson, CIO, Gardner Trucking

Company:
Gardner Trucking operates a growing fleet of trucks throughout 11 western states, with more than 1,100 trucks and 1,900 trailers on the road at any given time. Based in Chino, CA, the company offers a full range of services from line haul to full-service logistical solutions, and operates 42 dedicated trucking fleets on-site at various customer locations.

The problem:
Gardner Trucking relies heavily on its IT infrastructure to manage its business data and the data associated with its mobile workforce. The company’s backup requirements had grown quickly, and backing up to tape was seriously impacting productivity, not to mention the problems the company faced with unreliable, incomplete tape backups. Additionally, the IT staff at Gardner struggled with data restores from tape, which was a time and labor intensive process for each file needed.

Gardner Trucking quickly realized it needed to explore installing a new, cost-effective data backup and recovery solution to better support its continuous business growth and mobile workforce.

The solution:
After enduring months of problems with tape backups, the IT staff at Gardner Trucking, led by CIO Gary Larson, researched and considered several different backup approaches. Ultimately, the team chose ExaGrid’s disk-based backup system with data deduplication to work in conjunction with its existing backup application, Symantec’s Backup Exec. They chose the ExaGrid system based on its unique approach to data deduplication, and its scalability which provided much needed flexibility to accommodate the company’s growth.

Price was a major factor influencing the Gardner’s IT team decision making, and the ExaGrid system offered a competitive price with significantly better performance than other disk-based backup solutions. As with any purchase, research played a crucial role in the company’s decision and after careful consideration the team found that ExaGrid’s data deduplication technology allowed for the purchase and use of less disk space, which saved Gardner approximately 25 percent versus the cost of competitive solutions.

Coincidentally, Gardner Trucking made the switch from tape-based backup to disk-based backup with data deduplication just two days before a database crash. With the new backup system in place, which was up and running in 25 minutes, Gardner avoided a major data disaster and an estimated $200,000 loss in productivity.

How it worked:

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