ExaGrid Posts 20% Growth in 2015

Backup storage provider ExaGrid Systems, Inc. had a record year in 2015 and grew over 20% from 2014 to 2015.

The company was cash positive for all four quarters in 2015 and for the year, and has been cash positive for eight consecutive quarters.

It is ranked “best at disk-based backup storage with deduplication” by leading experts and as the only vendor in the ‘Visionary’ quadrant in the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Deduplication Backup Target Appliances is positioned for a more successful year in 2016. ExaGrid is growing faster than the overall disk-based backup storage with data deduplication market and is gaining market share.

As a provider of backup storage with deduplication with a landing zone and scale-out architecture, ExaGrid offers the industry’s fastest backups; the fastest restores, recoveries, and offsite tape copies; VM boots in seconds to minutes; and permanently fixes the backup window length as data grows. ExaGrid also eliminates the forklift upgrades and product obsolescence of the big backup storage vendors.

Turning it up in 2015, ExaGrid highlights include:

• Record top line bookings and revenue year
• Over 20% top line growth compared to 2014
• All four quarters of cash positive operation
• Strong growth in six-figure new customer opportunities
• ASP increased by 40% due to ExaGrid moving up market to larger terabyte data centers
• Surpassed 10,000 appliances sold
• Increased the scalable backup storage grid to ingest a one petabyte full backup
• The only vendor in the ‘Visionary’ quadrant in the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Deduplication Backup Target Appliances
• Integrated with Oracle RMAN Channels for performance balancing and failover
• Shipped the integrated Veeam Accelerated Data Mover with ExaGrid appliances
• Expansion of the sales organization in EMEA

“ExaGrid continues to move up market into more enterprise accounts, now selling into both the mid-market and enterprise,” said Bill Andrews, CEO,ExaGrid. “ExaGrid has the only solution that can keep up with IT environments that need fast ingest, a fixed-length backup window as data grows with fast restores and offsite tape copies, and VM boots in seconds to minutes. Virtualization has changed backup from merely restoring data to booting entire machines, and only ExaGrid’s landing zone and scale-out architecture can meet the new requirements.”

Vendors such as EMC Data Domain deduplicate data inline, which slows backups down and expands the backup window as data grows. In addition, requests for data restores are slow since the other vendors store only deduplicated data, which needs to be rehydrated for each request. Compared to EMC Data Domain, ExaGrid provides five times the restore, offsite tape copy, and VM boot performance (seconds to minutes vs. hours for EMC); keeps the backup window fixed as data grows; and provides ingest speed of almost four times that of EMC Data Domain.

“Backup storage with data deduplication is an over $3 billion market segment and, as result, ExaGrid has a lot of room to grow,” said Andrews. “We are hiring sales staff worldwide as quickly as we can.”

ExaGrid’s customers have tens of terabytes of data upwards to petabytes of data and typically deploy a second site ExaGrid appliance for disaster recovery. ExaGrid’s market is well above the SMB market where customers typically have less than 10TB of data and use a cloud solution for disaster recovery. ExaGrid’s customers use their own second data center for lower cost, high security, and fast recovery from site disasters. 

“Although the cloud is good for archive data, is it not conducive to backup data as it is too expensive, too slow, not secure, and virtually impossible to recover,” said Andrews.

A Year of Technological Innovation – Oracle Database Backups
ExaGrid supports Oracle RMAN Channels targeted at multiple NAS shares across multiple appliances in a scale-out Grid. RMAN Channels automatically writes ‘sections’ in parallel to all NAS shares and automatically redirects the next ‘section’ based on available targets.

RMAN Channels with ExaGrid has five major advantages:

• The Oracle database can be hundreds of terabytes in size and can be backed up in parallel to a single ExaGrid scale-out Grid.
• The database backup performance is accelerated as the sections are backed up in parallel across multiple appliances in a scale-out Grid.
• If any appliance in a Grid fails, the segments are automatically redirected to the active appliances, providing for automatic failover – which allows database backups to occur if an appliance fails.
• The most recent database is stored in an undeduplicated form in the ExaGrid landing zone allowing for the fastest restores while still allowing for storage efficiency as all long-term retention data is stored in deduplicated form. This avoids the lengthy data rehydration process of inline scale-up appliances that only store deduplicated data.
• As the database data grows, the backup window stays fixed in length as full appliances are added into a scale-out GRID bringing compute with capacity. This eliminates the forklift upgrades associated with inline scale-up deduplication appliances.

Praise from the Experts
ExaGrid continues to receive accolades from industry experts like Gartner and Storage Switzerland.

Gartner positioned ExaGrid as the sole company in the Visionary quadrant of the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Deduplication Backup Target Appliances. Gartner defines ‘visionaries’ as companies that deliver innovative products with capabilities that are often ahead of the mainstream in the market. 

George Crump, president, founder and lead analyst, Storage Switzerland, comments on ExaGrid’s recent v4.9 release: “Most solutions cannot take in a single multi-hundred terabyte Oracle RMAN backup. Most other backup architectures have a single front-end controller with scale-up disk shelves, and if the controller fails, all backups fail. But with ExaGrid, if there are eight appliances in a Grid and one fails, Oracle RMAN channels will redirect the backups to the remaining seven operational appliances so that backups can continue uninterrupted. This is critical for Oracle environments since a missed nightly backup can cause a lot of IT disruption the next day.”

In 2015, ExaGrid won numerous awards, including Computer Technology Review and IT Security Journal‘s MVP (Most Valuable Product) award. 

Kim Kay, associate publisher and editor-in-chief, WestWorldWide, LLC, included ExaGrid in its “elite group of innovative technology solutions that represent the standout leaders in their respective categories – solutions which we think should be at the top of every IT professional’s evaluation shortlist.”