ExaGrid EX40000E Accelerates Scale-Out Disk-Based Backup With De-Dupe

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. announced the EX40000E, a large and powerful appliance in its backup solutions with deduplication.

The EX40000E appliance is 66% more dense than its predecessor, providing capacity for a 40TB full backup in a 3U appliance. Leveraging the strength of ExaGrid’s scale-out GRID technology, up to 25 EX40000E appliances can be combined in a single scale-out GRID system, allowing for a 1PB full backup. The EX40000E has a maximum ingest rate of 8TB/hr. per appliance, so with 25 EX40000Es in a scale-out GRID, the maximum ingest rate is 200TB/hr., which is 3.5 times the ingest performance of the EMC Data Domain 9500 with DD Boost.

ExaGrid’s unique landing zone stores the most recent backups in their full undeduplicated form for restore, recovery, and VM boot performance that is up to ten times faster than inline deduplication appliances such as EMC Data Domain’s, which only store deduplicated data. The company’s landing zone can allow a VM boot ins to single-digit minutes versus hours for appliances that store only deduplicated data.

All other solutions deduplicate data inline, which does allow for storage savings and replicated bandwidth savings; however, these systems break backup windows up front and especially over time as data grows. In addition, they are painfully slow for restores, offsite tape copies, and VM boots because the data has to be rehydrated for every restore request.

“ExaGrid implemented data deduplication for storage and bandwidth efficiency but realized that doing so creates three new compute problems,” said Bill Andrews, CEO, ExaGrid. “With ExaGrid’s landing zone and scale-out architecture, all critical requirements of backup are met: storage and bandwidth efficiency; the fastest ingest for the shortest backup window; scale-out architecture that brings compute with capacity to keep the backup window fixed over time as data grows; and the fastest restores, offsite tape copies, and VM boots ins to minutes via the ExaGrid landing zone. ExaGrid built a true backup storage solution versus a deduplication appliance.“

The EX40000E appliance, which houses 96TB of raw and 78TB of usable data, can take in a 40TB full backup and store it as undeduplicated data in a front-end landing zone for fast restores and recoveries, and maintains a long-term historical version in a deduplicated data repository.

“Many of the solutions on the market just can’t keep up with a short backup window requirement in the face of rapid data growth,” said Andrews. “Furthermore, with the advent of virtualization, organizations need just-in-time recovery by booting VMs ins to minutes. Only ExaGrid can meet all of these requirements.“

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

Growing network of partners and support
Understanding and appreciating the complexity of robust backup at organizations of all kinds, the company supports a growing number of backup applications and utilities.

At the enterprise, the firm works with a number of solutions, including Veeam, Oracle RMAN, Veritas NetBackup, Veritas Backup Exec, EMC NetWorker, IBM TSM, Commvault Simpana, and over 18 other backup applications and utilities.

Leveraging the company with any of these applications
gives IT departments the best of all worlds with:

• Fastest ingest performance for the shortest backup windows;

• Integration with Veeam’s version V9, further improving company’s high ingest rate for even faster backup performance. Supports new per-VM backup file chain option, improved local backup copy performance, and further simplification of Veeam/ExaGrid setup;

• Most recent backups in their native, undeduplicated form in the landing zone for the fastest restores, offsite tape copies, and VM boots; and

• Fixed length backup window – even as data grows – due to full appliances in a scale-out GRID with processor, memory, and bandwidth with disk capacity expansion.