For American National Bank and Trust Company (NASDAQ: AMNB), managing tape and restoring data from it became extremely cumbersome, unreliable, time consuming and costly. As a public company in a highly regulated industry, American National Bank and Trust Company must ensure that its data is secure and can be accessed quickly and easily. The firm turned to ExaGrid Systems, the leader in cost-effective and scalable disk-based backup, to streamline and significantly improve its data backup operations.

One of the largest, locally-owned banking organizations in Virginia, American National Bank has grown to $800 million in assets with 18 branches and one loan production office in Virginia and North Carolina. The bank uses the ExaGrid system with its existing Symantec Backup Exec data protection application. IT administrators back up 40 servers totaling 500 GB of data. Using ExaGrid's unique byte-level delta data reduction, the bank estimates that it consumes less than a quarter of the disk space it would have needed with standard SATA disk storage to keep its required backup history.

"Tape doesn't afford us peace of mind about the reliability of our backups, nor do we have that data at our fingertips," said Michael Bailess, network administrator at American National Bank. "Disk-based backup with ExaGrid is much more stable. Backup time went from 12 to six hours, and it's easy to use. All we have to do is point the backup share to ExaGrid and it works."

ExaGrid is a turnkey plug-and-play solution that sits behind existing backup applications and enables faster and more reliable backups and restores. Backup windows are reduced by 30 to 80 percent. ExaGrid's unique byte-level delta data reduction and last backup compression, coupled with high quality SATA drives, is on average about 25 to 30 percent the price of standard drives without data reduction. This unique approach reduces the amount of disk space needed by at least 20 to 1.

"Using ExaGrid, we are able to rely on the viability of our backups and be proactive for backup and restores," added Bailess. The way ExaGrid manages disk space minimizes the amount of data to be stored and offers a tremendous cost/benefit result. It fits our IT environment and will scale to our needs. Our goal is to use the ExaGrid disk-based backup system at a second site, eliminating tape altogether."

"ExaGrid's innovative approach is a perfect fit for American National Bank. The organization has experienced a dramatic reduction in its backup window and greater overall efficiency in its daily backup operations," said Bill Andrews, president and CEO of ExaGrid Systems. "ExaGrid's ability to support a second system, with an off-site copy of the backup data, while using WAN resources efficiently, will help this banking institution quickly and more easily realize its vision of tape elimination."