ExaGrid With Nimble Storage

ExaGrid Systems, Inc.,, a provider of disk-based backup storage with data deduplication, partnered with Nimble Storage, Inc. to develop and deliver a variety of go-to-market programs.

This collaboration will provide a storage solution that addresses an organization’s storage needs. ExaGrid’s products are target-side backup storage appliances for longer-term backup retention needs, typically four weeks or more. Nimble provides primary, archive, and backup storage for shorter-term retention periods. Organizations that work with both ExaGrid and Nimble benefit from the price/performance of these next-generation products over the established brand solutions that can only offer earlier generations of storage products.

“ExaGrid continues to receive calls from resellers who want to sell the best of breed solutions – what they refer to as the ‘triumvirate’ of next-generation products,” said Bill Andrews, CEO, ExaGrid.  “This includes Nimble for primary storage, Veeam for backup software, and ExaGrid for backup storage.  We are getting a record number of reseller requests for combined events that include all three companies.“

“Nimble Storage customers can create highly efficient snapshots to reduce complexities associated with traditional backup,” said Dan Leary, VP, corporate development, solutions and alliances, Nimble Storage. “The combined solutions are designed to provide customers with a complete data protection offering, combining the speed and efficiency of Nimble snapshots with ExaGrid for longer-term backup and archive.“

ExaGrid and Nimble are regularly validated and recognized by industry analysts and pundits. Gartner, Inc. positioned ExaGrid as the sole ‘Visionary’ in its 2015 Magic Quadrant for Deduplication Backup Target Appliances ¹ and was also honored by Storage Magazine/Searchstorage.com as Product of the Year, Backup Storage. ExaGrid was named Most Valuable Product by Computer Technology Review and also received Network Computing’s ROI award.

Nimble Storage was named a leader in the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays² and was previously positioned by Gartner as a Visionary in the Magic Quadrant in the same category for two consecutive years. The report analyzes providers of mid-range, high-end, and NAS systems and hybrid arrays. More than 7,500 customers have deployed the Nimble Predictive Flash Platform across more than 50 countries. The Predictive Flash Platform combines flash performance with predictive analytics to predict and prevent barriers to data velocity caused by complex IT infrastructure. Nimble customers experience absolute performance, non-stop availability, and cloud-like agility that accelerate critical business processes.

ExaGrid provides second-generation backup storage with adaptive data deduplication, a landing zone, and a differentiated scale-out storage architecture. In contrast, first-generation appliances perform deduplication inline and have a scale-up architecture that stores deduplicated data but slows down backups, restores, and VM boots. ExaGrid’s approach provides faster backups by performing deduplication after landing backups to disk. It maintains the most recent non-deduplicated backups in a landing zone for fast restores and VM boots, and stores longer-term deduplicated retention data in its repository storage. Due to ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture, which adds compute with capacity, the backup window stays fixed in length even as data grows.

¹ Gartner Magic Quadrant for Deduplication Backup Target Appliances by Pushan Rinnen, Dave Russell and Robert Rhame, September 25, 2015.
² Gartner Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays Magic Quadrant written by Stanley Zaffos, Roger W. Cox, Valdis Filks, and Santhosh Rao October 21, 2015.