ExaGrid Issued Fourth U.S. Patent

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. received US Patent no. 7,925,623, Method and apparatus for integrating primary data storage with local and
remote data protection, the company’s fourth.

This new patent covers ExaGrid’s architecture for a two-tiered backup storage system with a front-end landing space and back-end data deduplication repository.

By using ExaGrid’s two-tiered storage appliances, customers benefit from backup and restore performance. The front-end landing space, combined with ExaGrid’s post-processing approach to deduplication, creates the fastest possible backups and allows for the rapid creation of tape copies for offsite storage. The separate back-end repository conserves disk storage capacity and inter-repository WAN/MAN bandwidth by incorporating Zone byte-level data deduplication.

Since each ExaGrid appliance within a system contains both a front-end landing space and back-end repository space, multiple appliances can be configured into a single GRID backup storage system, allowing end users to scale systems in increments of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10 or 13TB to a total capacity of 130TB without disruption. As each appliance is added to the GRID, additional networking, CPU power and memory are also included with the additional disk storage. This allows the performance of the GRID of ExaGrid appliances to scale along with growing backup capacity, all without the need for costly forklift upgrades required with competitive single controller architectures.

"With our 4th patent, ExaGrid continues to build on our established history of developing innovative technology and applying those innovations to solving difficult data protection challenges for our customers," said Dave Therrien, founder and CTO, ExaGrid Systems, Inc. "Our growing intellectual property portfolio extends our technology lead in disk-based backup with deduplication and enables ExaGrid to offer our customers the highest performance, best scalability, and most cost-effective disk-based backup system available. This new patent again acknowledges the uniqueness of our technology and reinforces ExaGrid’s place as a leader in the disk-based backup market."

ExaGrid’s disk backup system with data deduplication supports the industry’s backup applications and utilities, including CA ARCserve, CommVault Simpana, HP Data Protector, Linux/Unix dumps, Microsoft SQL dump, Oracle RMAN dumps, Symantec Backup Exec, Symantec NetBackup, Veeam Backup and Replication, Quest vRangerPro and VMware Backup.

ExaGrid disk backup systems are designed to meet the needs of companies backing-up between 1TB and 130TBs of data. ExaGrid’s approach to disk-based backup delivers performance and scalability without requiring costly forklift upgrades as data grows. ExaGrid customers achieve fast backup times because data is written directly to disk and data deduplication is performed post-process after the data is stored. In addition, ExaGrid’s GRID scalability enables organizations to store up to a 130TB backup plus retention. Performance scales with data growth since processing power, memory, and bandwidth are added along with storage capacity, and data loads are automatically balanced across all servers.