ExaGrid Systems, Inc. has enhanced its Disk-based Backup System with several customer-focused enhancements, including an industry-first, instant disaster recovery (DR) capability, higher performance connectivity options, expanded data handling and automated system health reports. These product enhancements allow customers to significantly improve the way they manage their backups by providing greater flexibility in handling disparate backup data types, delivering backup data more rapidly for DR purposes and providing proactive system health reporting on key operational metrics.

"We speak with IT professionals every day who struggle with tape backup and are eager to move to disk backup with deduplication," said Lauren Whitehouse, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "ExaGrid's Disk-based Backup System has the ingredients many organizations need to address their backup issues. Customers stand to benefit from ExaGrid's focus on increasing performance, expanding DR capabilities, a growing list of supported data types, and automated email-based reporting that reduces the system management burden."

The latest version of the ExaGrid Disk-based Backup system includes the following important enhancements and customer benefits:

Support for Higher Performance
10 Gigabit Ethernet Interfaces:

• ExaGrid's Disk-based Backup product line will now support the use of higher performance 10 gigabit Ethernet interfaces for connectivity to a customer's backup environment. This capability provides the speed of fibre channel connectivity without the higher cost or hassle.
• Instant DR Capability for Fastest Data Restoration from Remote Sites:
• ExaGrid's Disk-based Backup System has always maintained a full copy of an organization's most recent backup at the site where the backup was performed. To ensure the fastest possible recovery time during a disaster, ExaGrid now keeps the most recent full backup at a customer's disaster recovery site in its non-deduplicated form, ready for high-speed recovery in the event of a disaster at the primary location. ExaGrid is the first and only disk-backup with deduplication vendor to deliver this capability.
• By using the innovative, byte-level delta data deduplication technology, this instant DR capability is accomplished while still sending only deduplicated data over a customer's wide-area network, preserving a 50 to 1 WAN efficiency, versus sending entire non-deduplicated backups. This instant DR capability provides significantly faster restores than competing solutions, which have to reassemble deduplicated backups from millions or even billions of deduplicated fragments.

Additional Data Type Support Provides
Increased Flexibility:
Beyond its interoperability with industry-leading backup applications, ExaGrid now supports additional data types. ExaGrid delivers a 10 to 50:1 deduplication ratio, replicates the deduplicated data to a disaster recovery location, and can report a deduplication ratio by the individual backup jobs (Oracle RMAN and Unix/Linux data dumps). Additional supported data types include the following:

• Oracle RMAN Backups - customers can now simply send Oracle backups via the RMAN utility set directly to an ExaGrid Disk-based Backup System, bypassing the use of a backup agent.
• Unix/Linux File System Data Dumps - customers can now simply transfer file system data from Unix or Linux systems, bypassing the use of a backup agent.
• Non-deduplicating Data - customers now have the flexibility to simply allocate portions of the ExaGrid disk-based backup system for any type of data they want to protect on the ExaGrid system but do not wish to deduplicate.

With this release, ExaGrid supports leading backup applications such as Symantec Backup Exec and NetBackup, CA ARCserve, EMC Networker, CommVault Galaxy, and Vizioncore vRanger Pro; as well as other data types including VMware VMDK, Oracle RMAN, Linux/Unix data dumps and Microsoft SQL dumps. ExaGrid's future product plans include the support of many additional backup applications and utilities.

Automated System Reporting for Ease of Management:
With the release of this version, each ExaGrid Disk-based Backup System will deliver a daily status to a defined set of administrators, lowering the management touch time of the system even further. This easy to understand report includes:

• System status
• Current and past data deduplication ratios
• Replication status
• Detailed status by backup job

"ExaGrid continues to hear from organizations, which are eliminating tape from their backup and archive operations, that they want the full benefits of disk in terms of performance, scalability and ease-of-use," said Marc Crespi, vice president of product management, ExaGrid Systems. "Too many disk-based backup products with deduplication rob disk of its natural performance and scalability through their deduplication implementation. With this software enhancement release, ExaGrid further extends our product leadership by providing significantly faster recovery time at DR sites, increased flexibility in data protection and tools to even further reduce necessary system management touch time."