ExaGrid Systems Inc., a provider of cost-effective and scalable disk-based backup solutions with data de-duplication, announced Monday that it has enhanced its disk-based backup system by adding the ability to cross-protect up to nine major data center locations (multi-site backup capabilities), advanced backup-job-aware reporting and expanded backup capacities.
The new product enhancements allow customers to improve the way they manage their backups by allowing major data centers in multiple locations to backup to disk with de-duplication, and then cross-protect one another, and by providing unprecedented visibility into the status of backup data throughout its lifecycle within the system.
Headquartered in Westborough, Massachusetts, ExaGrid offers cost-effective and scalable disk-based backup solutions with byte-level data de-duplication. A scalable system that works with existing backup applications, ExaGrid is ideal for companies looking to eliminate the hassles of tape backup, while reducing their existing backup windows. ExaGrid's patented approach minimizes the amount of data to be stored by providing standard data compression for most recent backups along with byte-level data de-duplication technology for all previous backups. Customers can deploy the ExaGrid system at a primary site and at secondary sites to supplement or eliminate offsite tapes with live data repositories or for disaster recovery.
"Our lab validation testing reveals that ExaGrid is one of the most comprehensive disk-based backup solutions on the market," said Jeff Boles, senior analyst with The Taneja Group. "ExaGrid easily performed, scaled, and de-duplicated right out-of-the-box. ExaGrid's scalability makes their performance claims even more compelling. While ExaGrid's system performance starts out high, ExaGrid also enables users to scale to far greater performance and capacity than similar devices from the competition, and to get there in a pay-as-you-grow model that drives down the total ownership costs of disk-based backup for growing organizations. Few vendors offer disk-based backup solutions today with the pay-as-you-grow scalability, high performance, ease of use, and the full feature set that ExaGrid brings to the table."
The latest version of the ExaGrid disk-based backup system includes the following enhancements and customer benefits to offer multi-site data center cross protection. ExaGrid supports two-site or multi-site cross protection for up to 9 data center locations. As ExaGrid only moves the byte-level changes from the local site to offsite systems, only about 1/50th of the data has to traverse the WAN (wide area network). It also eliminates or supplements offsite tape with live disk-based repositories for long-term offsite retention or disaster recovery. It also offers simplified multi-site management, whereby a user with appropriate privileges can manage the entire multi-site environment through a single web-based user interface, versus products that require each site or device to be managed separately.
The new enhancements of the ExaGrid disk-based backup system also offer backup-job-aware reporting through advanced reporting correlates backup jobs stored on the ExaGrid with the backup application providing unprecedented visibility into the true status of the backup data. ExaGrid's Disk-based Backup System shows de-duplication ratio by backup job, by allowing organizations to optimize the results of byte-level data de-duplication. The ExaGrid system shows replication status by backup job, ensuring that any remote site restores are executed from complete backup jobs, and that the most recent data possible is being used versus resorting to a guessing game during a critical recovery scenario.
The new enhancements of the ExaGrid system offer high capacity, scalable virtualized GRID architecture, which store a 30 TB full backup, plus weeks or months backup history/retention, in a single GRID system with a single management console (6 x 5 TB ExaGrid servers = 30TB Virtualized GRID system). It also offers plug-and-play growth through which new systems virtualize together automatically, and no splitting data or losing de-duplication efficiency across separate systems. The performance scales with data growth as processing power, memory and bandwidth are added along with storage capacity. It also offers automatic data load balancing across all servers in the GRID, and multiple 30TB GRID systems can be installed for increased capacity.
The new enhancements of the ExaGrid backup system offer good performance for short backup window and quick data restoration. The fast backup performance is due to post-process de-duplication. It writes directly to disk without any on-the-fly processing to slow down backups. ExaGrid Backup offers throughput of up to 4.08 TB/hour. By keeping the most recent backup in its whole form and storing all previous versions as the byte-level changes, ExaGrid offers rapid restore of backup jobs and fast tape copy for offsite tapes, unlike other solutions which require re-assembly of every backup job from millions, or even billions of small blocks tracked in large hash tables. ExaGrid Restore offers throughput of up to 2.6 TB/hour.
"We listened carefully to our customers and added several important new capabilities that greatly improve the way they execute and manage their backups," said Marc Crespi, VP of product management, ExaGrid Systems. "This latest product version allows customers to deploy multi-site cross protection for up to 9 data center locations, simplifying multi-site data center backup and improving disaster recovery capabilities. Also, with the addition of backup-job-aware reporting, ExaGrid provides unprecedented visibility into the true status of backup data at every stage of its lifecycle within the system. These enhancements, combined with ExaGrid's post-processing data de-duplication and scalable GRID architecture, provide customers with the shortest backup window and fastest restores possible even as their data grows."
The latest version of ExaGrid Disk-based Backup System is expected to ship within the next 30 days.