Partnership Between ExaGrid and Unitrends

Unitrends, Inc. and ExaGrid Systems, Inc. announced a partnership that will enable mid-sized enterprises to address heterogeneous IT environments and the sprawl associated with data growth.

The integration of Unitrends’ software-only product, Unitrends Enterprise Backup, and ExaGrid’s purpose-built disk-based backup appliance offers a solution to these scalability and complexity problems.

Heterogeneous IT environments combine physical and virtual architectures, multiple operating systems, and platforms. Given these multi-infrastructure environments and data growth rates averaging 30% or more annually, IT organizations are challenged to address scalability and complexity in cost-effective ways. Technologies that reduce the amount of storage needed for backup and also provide an all-in-one solution are required to reduce the burden on already-stressed IT organizations.

"This partnership brings together Unitrends’ scalable all-in-one backup solution and ExaGrid’s unrivaled data deduplication to deliver enterprise-level data protection for the mid-tier enterprise. There is a great need for backup and recovery to support agile IT environments and cost-effectively scale to support today’s data growth pressures. Unitrends is extending its leadership through this partnership with ExaGrid, and our joint solution offers IT organizations complete backup and DR functionality as an end to end solution," said Jim Caro, Unitrends SVP of Corporate Development and Global Alliances.

The combination of ExaGrid and Unitrends’ recently released Unitrends Enterprise Backup is for IT departments that want to achieve the shortest backup windows, replace their unreliable tape libraries, and avoid costly forklift upgrades as data grows. Those IT organizations looking for solutions to bridge their physical and virtual environments can leverage the flexibility of Unitrends’ software offering, along with the GRID scalability and post-process deduplication of ExaGrid’s physical appliance.

"IT budgets remain tight as data grows and virtualized server infrastructures are increasing, which means there is an even greater demand for a solution like this, which is designed specifically to ensure faster and more reliable backup and recovery in both physical and virtual infrastructure environments. With the seamless integration of ExaGrid and Unitrends Enterprise Backup, customers can be more confident that they can get better backups, quick recovery of physical and virtual servers, and the most cost-effective scalability in the industry as data grows," said Marc Crespi, VP of Product Management, ExaGrid.

About Unitrends Enterprise Backup
This software-only virtual appliance integrated with Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere, offers enterprise features such as:

• Simple deployment and setup via scale-down technology.
• Single server backup combined with multiple servers backup via scale-down technology.
• Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere incremental forever with on-demand synthetics.
• Microsoft Hyper-V FLR (File Level Restore).
• Storage virtualization, thin provisioning, and global deduplication.
• Archive file-level search.
• Support for over 100 versions of computers, storage, operating systems, hypervisors, and applications.
• Instant recovery using failover virtualization.

About ExaGrid’s Disk-Based Backup Appliance
Customers achieve fast backup times because an approach scales performance with data growth, prevents backup windows from re-exploding and avoids costly forklift upgrades and product obsolescence. The ExaGrid system is a plug-and-play disk backup appliance that works with existing backup applications and enables faster and more reliable backups and restores. Data is written directly to disk with deduplication performed post-process after the data is protected, and as data grows, the company adds full servers in a grid – including processor, memory, disk and bandwidth-compared to competitive systems that just add disk. Customers report that backup time is reduced by 30% to 90% over traditional tape backup. Patented zone-level data deduplication technology and most recent backup compression reduces the amount of disk space needed by a range of 10:1 to as high as 50:1 or more, resulting in a cost comparable to traditional tape-based backup.