ExaGrid brings scale-out disk-based backup with deduplication

Leveraging the strength of ExaGrid’s scale-out GRID technology, the EX32000E can combine up to 14 appliances in a single scale-out GRID, allowing for a 448TB full backup in a single system, representing a 52 percent increase in total capacity. With 14 in a scale-out GRID, this increase positions the EX32000E as one of the largest full-backup target systems on the market, with 882TB of usable storage and over 1PB of raw storage.

The EX32000E has an ingest rate of 5.6TB per hour upwards to 7.5TB per hour in a single system depending on CIFS, NFS, Veeam Data Mover, or OST. With OST, the EX32000E has an ingest rate of 105TB per hour with 14 appliances in a GRID system.

This rate (105TB per hour) is three times the ingest performance of EMC Data Domain with Boost. And with ExaGrid’s unique landing zone, the most recent backups are kept in their full undeduplicated form for restore, recovery, and VM boot performance of up to ten times faster than inline deduplication appliances, such as EMC Data Domain, which only stores deduplicated data.

“We are excited to announce the EX32000E with 14 appliances in a single scale-out GRID. We have spoken with many large IT departments that understand the challenges of inline data deduplication with a scale-up storage model and are looking for a solution that provides faster backups, a fixed length backup window as data grows, and fast restores – especially VM boots in second to minutes,” said Bill Andrews, CEO of ExaGrid.

The new appliance, which houses 72TB of raw and 63TB of usable data, can take in a 32TB full backup undeduplicated in a front-end landing zone for fast restores and recoveries and maintain a long-term historical version in a deduplicated data repository.

“Our unique landing zone and scale-out approach provides restores and recoveries that are up to ten times faster than the inline deduplication approaches of other vendors, and will provide two to three times the backup (ingest) performance when compared to a scale-up approach, which only provides more disk as the data grows. The backup and restore performance of the EX32000E is unmatched – and at half the price, is in a league all its own,” said Andrews.

The ExaGrid scale-out approach brings compute with capacity – adding processor, memory and bandwidth as well as disk – allowing the backup window to stay fixed in length even as data grows. This approach is unique to ExaGrid and makes it the only disk-based backup system that maintains a fixed backup window.

A Growing Network of Partners and Support
Understanding and appreciating the complexity of robust backup at organisations of all kinds, ExaGrid supports a growing number of backup applications and utilities.
At the enterprise level, ExaGrid works with a number of solutions, including Symantec NetBackup, EMC Networker, IBM TSM, and CommVault Simpana. Leveraging ExaGrid with any of these applications gives IT departments the best of all worlds with:
· The fastest ingest performance for short backup windows
· The most recent backups in their native, undeduplicated form in the landing zone for fast restores, recoveries, and VM boots
· A fixed backup window as data grows due to full appliances in a scale-out GRID with processor, memory, and bandwidth with disk capacity expansion

ExaGrid also announced support for additional backup applications and utilities, increasing the number of supported applications, utilities, and database dumps to more than 25. In addition to backup applications already supported, such as Veeam, Symantec Backup Exec, arcserve, HP Data Protector, Oracle RMAN, SQL Dumps, and many others, ExaGrid has added support for:
· Symantec System Recovery
· Unitrends Enterprise Backup
· Unitrends Virtual Backup
· Zmanda
Additionally, ExaGrid has reduced the form factor of two of its models, the EX5000 and EX7000 appliances, from 3U to 2U, saving valuable rack space in the datacentre.