ESG Labs Validates Exagrid

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. announced that the results of
a lab review by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), an analyst firm
specializing in the testing and analysis of specific storage-related
products, have confirmed that the ExaGrid Disk-based Backup System
provides leading backup and restore rates, linear performance and
scalability with large and growing data amounts, and substantial cost
savings due to data de-duplication.

The recently published report details the results of ESG Lab’s
comprehensive testing of the ExaGrid Disk-based Backup System and
validates ExaGrid’s product claims in all
aspects of data backup and recovery, including high-speed backup and
restore rates, data de-duplication ratios, linear scalability, remote
replication and general ease of installation and management.

The following excerpts from the ESG Lab report discuss ExaGrid’s
performance in several key areas that organizations should consider as
they evaluate a disk-based backup system with data de-duplication.

Backup and Restore Performance:
“ESG Research indicates that performance is
the top priority for data center managers considering a disk-based
backup solution. ExaGrid uses a scalable post-process de-duplication
approach for optimal backup and recovery performance. As an organization’s
data grows, the ExaGrid approach maintains day-one backup and restore
performance. Using real-world data and a real-world backup application,
ESG Lab has confirmed that ExaGrid can backup data at a rate of 4 TB/hr
for a fully configured grid. Based on ESG Lab’s
experience testing a number of disk-based backup systems in recent
years, this is a superb level of performance.”

Real-world Data De-duplication Ratios:
“Data de-duplication changes the economics of
backup to disk by reducing the cost of data retained on disk. ESG Lab
testing and feedback from ExaGrid customers indicates that
de-duplication can be used to reduce disk capacity by a factor of twenty
to one or more depending on the type of data being backed up, the backup
policies in use and the number of backups retained on disk.”

Linear Scalability:
“ExaGrid scales to meet a wide variety of
performance and capacity requirements. ESG Lab found that adding a new
server to an existing grid is straightforward. Automatic spillover and
migration provides the flexibility needed to grow, maintain and tune a
growing pool of virtualized capacity. Taken together with the space
savings provided by de-duplication, the scalability of a singly-managed
ExaGrid system reduces the cost and complexity of managing growing
disk-based backup requirements.”

WAN-Efficient Remote Replication:
“ESG Lab has verified that ExaGrid’s
data de-duplication significantly reduces the amount of data that needs
to be transferred over the WAN, enabling what may have otherwise been
impossible or prohibitively costly. ESG Lab has also confirmed that
ExaGrid remote replication has no impact on backup performance. It’s
a cost-effective alternative to tape for offsite archival.”

Ease of Setup and Management:
“Initial configuration of an ExaGrid system
is simple and intuitive. Integration with existing backup application
polices was straightforward. The first backup job was running sixteen
minutes after beginning a configuration from scratch on a pre-wired
system.”

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG)

ExaGrid Systems, Inc.