ExaGrid Software V.6.2 with Five Key Performance, Integration, and Security Features

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. announced software version 6.2, which begins shipping in early December 2022.

It is constantly driving improvements in 5 key areas: ingest performance for the fastest backups and shortest backup window, fastest restores to keep user productive, scalability to ensure a fixed-length backup window as data grows as well as no forklift upgrades and no planned product obsolescence, lowest cost up front and over time, and a security story including the ability to recover after a security attack such as ransomware.

Architecture employs:

• Front-end disk-cache Landing Zone for fast backups
  • Optimized for large backup jobs, parallel backup support (job concurrency), no inline de-dupe to slow backups down, encryption at the drive level to increase performance, and integrations with key backup applications for front-end load balancing
  • Fast restores as the data is in the native backup application format and is non-de-duped to avoid compute-intensive data rehydration
• Scale-out architecture
  • Keeps a fixed-length backup window as data grows
  • Eliminates disruptive and costly forklift upgrades
  • Can mix and match any age and any size appliance eliminating planned product obsolescence to reduce costs over time
• Non-network-facing Repository Tier
  • De-duped data to store all current and long-term retention data for cost savings
  • Not visible or accessible from the network
  • Delayed deletes to ensure data deleted on the front-end Landing Zone is not immediately deleted in the repository ensuring data is ready for recovery after an attack
  • Immutable data objects that are not deleted, changed, or modified to ensure recovery from encryption events

5 key updates in V.6.2:

Veritas NetBackup single target storage pool
The company has integrated with Veritas NetBackup and presents a single virtualized target pool of storage at each site. This approach automates job management between NetBackup and ExaGrid, where backup data is automatically sent to available the firm’s appliances for front-end performance. Backup data is directed into any appliance as all company’s appliances are in a single integrated scale-out system. It automatically load balances all data across all non-network facing repositories for full storage utilization and globally de-dupes data across all repositories for storage savings.

Veritas IT analytics
The firm has integrated with Veritas IT analytics, allowing reporting on key data statistics from the company’s storage. This allows enterprises to include ‘Tiered Backup’ storage along with unified insights for backup, storage, and virtual infrastructure.

ExaGrid, including Single Target Storage Pool and support of NetBackup Analytics, now has a total of 9 Veritas NetBackup integrations, including support of NetBackup Accelerator, OST Integration, integration with NetBackup media server hardware, AIR (Auto Image Replication), and GRT (granular level restore), optimized de-dupe, and instant recovery.

ExaGrid Cloud Tier features and integrations
The company’s physical appliances on premise in the data center can replicate data to the public clouds for DR. It has improved the performance and scalability of its ExaGrid Cloud Tier for Amazon AWS and has added the firm’s Cloud Tier support for Microsoft Azure. Physical on-site appliances replicate the de-duped data in the repository to AWS or Azure, which is then written to AWS or Azure storage for long-term retention. The de-duped data uses about 1/50th of the bandwidth versus unde-duped data. It encrypts the data in transit, and the cloud providers encrypt the data at rest.

Improved performance
The firm has improved its Adaptive Deduplication performance, increasing the Repository Tier’s overall performance and further increasing the scalability and recovery points of data in the non-network-facing Repository Tier and offsite disaster recovery copy.

It has improved the performance of Veeam Software’ synthetic fulls (Veeam V12) by adding support for Veeam’s Fast Clone technology in ExaGrid repositories. The synthetics fulls are at least 30x faster than previous versions.

Improved security
The software has a ransomware recovery solution with a non-network-facing Repository Tier (tiered air gap), delayed delete policy, immutable data objects, and 2FA support.

The company has added 2 features:

• An alert on large delete is generated as an early detection warning if a threat actor/hacker is trying to delete a large amount of recently ingested data (above a set operational threshold) on the ExaGrid front-end Landing Zone.
• An alert on data de-dupe change is generated when the de-dupe ratio changes below a set threshold signaling that a large amount of encrypted data is being sent to the ExaGrid front-end Landing Zone or that the data on the Landing Zone is being encrypted.

These features add an early alert warning in addition to the current firm’s Retention Time-Lock (RTL) functionality, ensuring that the data in the non-network-facing tier is available for recovery.

“ExaGrid continues to focus on improving backup and restore performance, scalability, cost savings, and security,” said Bill Andrews, CEO. “Since ExaGrid is 100% focused on backup storage, all we do is obsess about making backup storage better. We are the only company WW focusing solely on backup storage. It is a testament to the product that we are installed in over 80 countries worldwide, have 99% of our customers on yearly maintenance and support contracts, have a NPS of +81, and a customer retention rate of 95%. All of these numbers are market-leading in storage. ExaGrid is a financially healthy and growing company that is cash positive, P&L positive, and EBITDA positive. The combination of our product, customer support, and financial strength is why customers trust ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage.”

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