Record 3Q18 Bookings and Revenue for ExaGrid

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. announced record bookings and revenue for 3Q18.

It grew at a rate of 30% over the same quarter of the prior year, continuing its trend of progressive growth at a faster rate than that of the overall market and resulting in progressive market share gain.

The company also continued its up-market trajectory, attracting increasing numbers of enterprise customers with hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of data to be backed up.

“This was our best bookings and revenue quarter in the history of the company,” said Bill Andrews, CEO and president. “We are continuing to replace old and expensive systems – including Dell EMC Data Domain, HPE StoreOnce, and many other deduplication solutions – that are slow for backups due to inline deduplication and are slow for restores as they only store deduplicated data.“

In addition to record 3Q18 bookings and revenue, ExaGrid achieved the following:
• A Net Promoter Survey of customers yielded a Net Promoter Score of +73, considered to be ‘excellent’ by Net Promoter standards. This customer loyalty metric measures how likely existing customers are to recommend a vendor’s product or service to a colleague.
• ExaGrid is relocating its corporate offices at the end of 2018 in order to better accommodate the company’s growing engineering, IT, customer support, inside sales, marketing, finance, and executive staff.
• A sampling of the company’s many key global customer wins in 3Q18 includes:

• Fast response to Hurricane Florence – A large US-based provider of medical practice management services and technology has a North Carolina-based client – a practice located in the path of Hurricane Florence, a monster storm that hit the Carolina coast in early September. ExaGrid’s customer contacted ExaGrid, requesting 400TB of capacity plus landing zone for its client practice. Shipped that day and installed the next in North Carolina, the system was used to backup the practice’s data, was de-installed, and was shipped to its out-of-state data center that evening for DR.
• A global manufacturer of metal components for mining and construction, previously using Dell EMC Data Domain and NetWorker, was facing a rip-and-replace of their existing system. Over the incumbents – as well as Cohesity – customer opted for a combined ExaGrid and Veeam dual-site solution for both onsite backups as well as offsite DR protection.
• Located in France, an association of private hospitals chose ExaGrid over HPE StoreOnce due to ExaGrid’s integration with Veeam and its lower TCO.
• A Mexican telecommunications company was faced with a data center move and decided that ExaGrid – due to its landing zone – would provide them with the speed and flexibility they needed for this project as well as future backup and DR requirements.
• A Swiss social insurance company replaced HPE StoreOnce after a head-to-head POC.
• A Middle Eastern insurer located in Oman was faced with more stringent backup retention requirements to maintain its compliance under the Islamic Shari’a framework. Customer chose ExaGrid over HPE StoreOnce for its scalability to ensure continued retention compliance as data volumes increase.
• A Canadian managed services provider replaced HPE Data Protector and Avamar with Veeam, and replaced HPE StoreOnce and Dell EMC Data Domain with ExaGrid. These selections were made over the incumbent solutions (as well as Commvault and Veritas) due to Veeam-ExaGrid’s scalability and performance.
• The German subsidiary of an eminent global defense company is replacing HPE Data Protector with Veeam, and its tape library with ExaGrid due to ExaGrid’s deduplication and its integration with Veeam.
• A European salt mine that produces five million tons of salt annually chose ExaGrid to replace its HPE disk. Among the many features and benefits, ExaGrid’s landing zone was the deciding factor.
• Longer-term retention requirements prompted a South African high-grade manganese mining company to compare the cost of using ExaGrid for backup storage to standard primary disk storage. Data deduplication approach was a fraction of the cost of standard disk.
• The 2nd largest coal producer in the Eastern U.S. replaced HPE StoreOnce and Quantum with ExaGrid. Customer’s POC showed superior performance with ExaGrid and Veeam against the incumbent vendors as well as Rubrik.
  • The company continues its expansion with the addition of field sales teams in EMEA, APAC, and Latin America.

“Customers have used the first generation of deduplication appliances for years and have hit the wall because inline deduplication is slow and does not scale,” said Andrews. “ExaGrid now offers the largest system in the industry – one that can take in up to a 2PB full backup at up to 432TB/hour, which is 3X faster than its closest competitor.”

Unlike first generation deduplication solutions that were either built into a backup application media server or into a scale-up storage appliance, ExaGrid delivers a backup true scale-out architecture with data deduplication. It is typically half the cost of the large brand solutions and also improves backup and restore performance by combining zone-level deduplication, adaptive deduplication, global deduplication, and a unique landing zone.

As the market matures, customers are understanding the performance degradation that data deduplication can have on backup unless a solution is intentionally architected to prevent any such impact. All deduplication solutions reduce storage and WAN bandwidth to a degree, but ExaGrid solves the three inherent compute problems to achieve faster backups, restores, and VM boots by leveraging its unique landing zone, adaptive deduplication, and scale-out architecture.

“First generation deduplication solutions can be cost prohibitive for backup storage and are also slow for backups, restores, and VM boots, which is why over 80% of ExaGrid’s newly-acquired customers are replacing Dell EMC Data Domain, HP StoreOnce, Commvault Deduplication, and the Veritas 5200/5300 series of appliances with ExaGrid,” Andrews said.

All backup storage vendors reduce storage and bandwidth to varying degrees but provide slow ingest rates because they perform data deduplication ‘inline.’ In addition, because they only store deduplicated data, restore speeds and VM boots are also very slow. Because the company has eliminated the three compute challenges inherent to backup storage with data deduplication, ExaGrid’s ingest rate is 6X faster – and restores/VM boots are up to 20X faster – than its closest competitor.

Unlike the first generation vendors that only add capacity as data grows, ExaGrid appliances add compute with capacity, ensuring that the backup window remains fixed in length. ExaGrid uses a scale-out architecture with a loading zone, which holistically addresses all of the scalability and performance challenges of backup storage.

ExaGrid’s published customer success stories and enterprise stories number over 350, more than all other vendors in the space combined. These include a two-page narrative and customer quote, demonstrating how satisfied customers are with company’s architectural approach, differentiated product, and customer support.