IT Press Tour 68: ExaGrid

We had the opportunity to meet ExaGrid for the 4th time during the recent 68th edition of The IT Press Tour held last week in Boston, MA.

Bill Andrews, CEO, ExaGrid, introduced the company as the largest independent vendor focused 100% on backup storage, shipping for over 18 years with a customer base exceeding 5,200 organizations across 108 countries and appliances certified in 132 countries.

The company reports double-digit growth, is cash, P&L and EBITDA positive every quarter, carries no debt, and maintains a NPS of +81. Its go-to-market machine combines 200+ sales staff, resellers and distributors in 70+ countries, and partnerships with 14 Global Systems Integrators including HCL and Kyndryl. Brand-name customers span manufacturing (Airbus, Bridgestone, Northrop Grumman), healthcare (Pfizer, Kaiser Permanente, NHS), banking (Barclays, BNP Paribas, Maybank), business services (Accenture, KPMG, FIS) and government (NASA, U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force). Customer retention stands at 95.6% (98% in the top 40% of accounts), with attrition driven mainly by acquisitions or cloud migration rather than competitive losses.

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ExaGrid’s differentiator is its Tiered Backup Storage architecture, combining a disk-cache Landing Zone for fast ingest and restore with a non-network-facing Repository Tier holding deduplicated long-term data. The scale-out design (up to 32 appliances per system) delivers a fixed-length backup window, with HDD models (EX36 to EX189) scaling to 6PB full backups and new all-SSD models (EX90, EX135, EX270, EX540) reaching 17.3PB at 115.2TB/hour ingest. The vendor positions itself against primary storage (Dell, HPE, NetApp, Hitachi Vantara, Everpure, Huawei) and inline deduplication appliances (Dell Data Domain, HPE StoreOnce, NetBackup Appliances), arguing competitors suffer from slow inline dedupe ingest, restore rehydration penalties and forklift upgrades. Win rates exceed 70% (74% trailing four quarters) and reach 83% after a proof-of-concept. The platform integrates with 25+ backup applications including Veeam (further deduplicating 2:1 to 14:1, SOBR support), Commvault (15:1 additional deduplication, Spill & Fill), Rubrik, Cohesity, IBM, HYCU, Acronis and Oracle RMAN with nine certified NetBackup integrations.

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Security is anchored by a tiered air gap via the non-network-facing Repository Tier, AI-Powered Retention Time-Lock with Auto Detect & Guard for anomalous-deletion response, immutable objects, delayed-delete policies, drive-level encryption with external key management, RBAC, 2FA, SSH keys, IP whitelisting and a dedicated Security Officer role, with DORA, GDPR and NIS 2 compliance plus Common Criteria and STIG targeted by end-2026. Disaster recovery supports cross-site replication, hub-and-spoke topologies across 16 sites with 50:1 WAN efficiency, tertiary-hop chains and DR targets in customer data centers, colos, AWS or Azure. Support combines assigned Level-2 engineers, in-theater coverage in local languages, customer-installable hardware (30 minutes to 3 hours), guaranteed 7-year HDD and 5-year SSD useful life, and 3-year price protection capping M&S increases at 4% annually.

The end-of-June release will add NFS-over-the-wire encryption, MSP share-quota tracking and billing reporting, and expanded Cohesity support, with further details due in July.

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