ExaGrid Introducing Universal Backup Share

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. introduced Universal Backup Share, a product feature that further expands the advantages of its zone-level deduplication over traditional block-level deduplication approaches by providing the ability to accept backup data from a potentially unlimited range of backup applications, utilities and data sources.

With Universal Backup Share, ExaGrid combines generic backup application support with a grid-based, scalable architecture that enables customers to keep adding nodes as their data grows, avoiding costly forklift upgrades.

Drawing on this new capability, ExaGrid also announced support for three additional backup applications, which can now perform backups on ExaGrid’s backup appliances: Acronis Backup & Recovery, BridgeHead Healthcare Data Management, and CommVault Simpana Archive. ExaGrid is certifying additional backup applications using the new product. Additional announcements will be made in the coming months.

Traditional backup approaches, such as EMC Data Domain, use block-level algorithms. Because block-level deduplication stores and matches unique blocks, managing all backup data requires a hash table so large that this approach suffers from scaling limitations. This forces an appliance architecture consisting of a controller unit with multiple disk shelves, with costly adverse consequences for scalability as data grows. Because additional processing resources are not added to handle the increased workload with data growth, the customer’s backup windows increase as data grows and the components that determine performance remain static, ultimately requiring a costly ‘forklift upgrade.’

In contrast, ExaGrid uses zone-level deduplication, where backup jobs are broken into large, variable length zones (instead of blocks). These zones are then examined by the deduplication algorithm, which looks for just the unique bytes from one zone to another. Unlike block-level deduplication, the tracking tables required for zone-level deduplication are smaller and can be easily copied across appliances allowing for a scalable grid-based architecture. This distributed grid architecture scales by adding full servers – disk, CPU, memory and bandwidth-with each appliance. By adding full servers with data growth, backup windows stay permanently short and there are no disruptive forklift upgrades.

Furthermore, only systems using zone-level deduplication can both be part of a scalable grid architecture and be generic in nature, supporting a variety of applications. Block-level systems face a tradeoff between scalability and broad application support.

Universal Backup Share is available to new and existing customers using ExaGrid’s disk backup with deduplication system.

Marc Crespi, VP of Product Management, ExaGrid, said: "ExaGrid already offers the most scalable architecture in the industry, and with Universal Backup Share, there are practically no limitations on the number of backup applications ExaGrid now supports, or will support soon. Only ExaGrid now provides the advantages of both generic backup application support and scalability."