Organizations come to ExaGrid because we are the only company that implemented a Tiered Backup Storage architecture with deduplication in a way fixed all the challenges of backup storage. ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage offers a unique disk-cache Landing Zone and scale-out architecture that provide the fastest backups — resulting in the shortest fixed backup window, the fastest local restores, fastest offsite tape copies, and instant VM recoveries. The backup window stays fixed-length as the data grows and costs are reduced up front and over time. All first generation inline deduplication approaches save some amount of storage and bandwidth but fall short on solving the three new compute problems that deduplication creates. We believe in what we do, and our customers benefit from it every single day.
Physical Environments:
ExaGrid’s appliances are deduplication storage targets for all industry leading backup applications.
ExaGrid can take backups in from
- Traditional backup applications
- Specialized backup utilities
- Virtualized backup applications
- SQL and Oracle RMAN dumps
- UNIX tar files
ExaGrid allows IT departments to use any combination of industry leading backup applications, utilities, and database dumps to a single ExaGrid system.
ExaGrid grows as your data grows. ExaGrid has nine various sized appliance models and up to 25 appliances can be mixed and matched in a single GRID system. This allows IT departments to buy what they need as they need it, protecting their initial decision and investment.
ExaGrid’s full appliances in a GRID is a scale-out storage approach for backup that brings full server resources (processor, memory, and bandwidth) with all capacity. This approach ensures a fixed backup window as data grows and eliminates expensive forklift upgrades in the future.
An ExaGrid system can scale to 1PB in a single GRID system. All appliances onsite and offsite at the disaster recovery site are managed under a single user interface.
ExaGrid can cross-protect up to 16 data centers in a hub-and-spoke topology with cross-site replication.
The flexible scalability coupled with nine appliance models of various sizes allows IT organizations both large and small to buy what they need as they need it.
Virtual Environments:
IT environments are increasingly becoming virtualized for the majority of applications.
Virtualized backup applications have many unique features and functions such as the ability to:
- boot a VM from the backup storage system when the primary VM environment is offline,
- perform audits or Sure Backups to prove to an internal or external audit team that VMs can be booted or restored in the case of a failure,
- create a synthetic full on a regular basis in order to ensure reliable full backup restores
- boot a VM on the backup system to test patch, configuration, and other updates before rolling them out to the production environment.
ExaGrid’s unique approach allows for all virtualized backup features to be fast as ExaGrid maintains a full copy of the most recent full VM backups in their full undeduplicated form, avoiding the need for time-consuming data rehydration for each request. Restores, recoveries, VM boots, and tape copies are as fast as reading from disk.
ExaGrid allows IT departments to use any combination of industry-leading backup applications, utilities, and database dumps to a single ExaGrid system.
ExaGrid grows as your data grows. ExaGrid has nine various sized appliance models and can mix and match up to 25 appliances in a single GRID system. This allows IT departments to buy what they need as they need it, protecting their initial decision and investment.
ExaGrid’s full appliances in a GRID is a scale-out storage approach for backup that brings full server resources (processor, memory, and bandwidth) with all capacity. This approach ensures a fixed backup window as data grows and eliminates expensive forklift upgrades in the future.
ExaGrid can scale to 1PB in a single GRID system. All appliances onsite and offsite at the disaster recovery site are managed under a single user interface.
ExaGrid can cross-protect up to 16 data centers in a hub-and-spoke topology with cross-site replication.
The flexible scalability coupled with nine appliance models of various sizes allows IT organizations both large and small to buy what they need as they need it.
Private Cloud Disaster Recovery:
ExaGrid supports replication from the primary site to a secondary site for disaster recovery. The disaster recovery site can be an organization’s own second data center or rented rack space at a third-party hosting facility.
On a week-to-week basis, approximately 2% of the data changes at the byte level, and therefore only 1/50th of the data needs to be transferred. ExaGrid’s deduplication requires about 1/50th of the bandwidth versus transferring undeduplicated backup data.
ExaGrid can also cross-protect data. If site A is sending backups into an ExaGrid appliance and site B is also sending backups into an ExaGrid appliance, then ExaGrid can replicate the data coming into site A to site B and the data coming into site B to site A.
ExaGrid also supports up to 16 major data centers in a cross-protection group with a master hub and 15 spokes. All spokes replicate to a master hub disaster recovery site. The data being backed up at the master disaster recovery site is replicated to any of the spoke sites for disaster recovery.
Over 50% of ExaGrid’s customers have eliminated tape both onsite and offsite by using an ExaGrid system onsite for local backup and restores and then replicating to a second-site ExaGrid as a second data center for disaster recovery.
ExaGrid has a unique advantage for unidirectional replication. If the second site is for disaster recovery only, then the second-site ExaGrid can be configured to be used as a repository only. ExaGrid is asymmetrical as the second-site system can have the front-end landing zone and repository disk all be used as a repository. All other solutions are symmetrical, which requires the same size system on both sides of the replication. This unique ExaGrid approach allows a half-size system to be used at the second site which saves valuable budget dollars over other solutions.
Hybrid Cloud Disaster Recovery:
Many organizations prefer not to run their own disaster recovery (DR) site because they:
- do not have a second-site data center for DR.
- prefer not to rent space in a hosting facility or acquire and operate the DR site system.
- do not want to buy capital equipment and prefer to pay a monthly fee per GB as an operating expense versus a capital expense.
ExaGrid has partnered with ATScloud and OffSiteDataSync (ODS) to offer an ExaGrid Hybrid Cloud service. ATScloud and ODS house racks of ExaGrid systems at their data centers, allowing customers to replicate from their onsite ExaGrid system to an ExaGrid system owned and operated by either ATScloud or ODS.
Both service providers offer the following benefits for offsite DR:
- ExaGrid target systems are owned and operated by ATScloud or ODS, and are located in a high-quality, high-speed, and high-availability data center.
- Added security layers are in place around data transfer, data access security, and data-at-rest security.
- With this pay-as-you-use model, organizations pay by the GB per month.
In a typical scenario this is how it works. The customer acquires an ExaGrid system for their onsite data center to back up and maintain local retention for fast backups and local restores. The onsite ExaGrid system replicates data to an offsite ExaGrid system located at ATScloud or ODS for DR. ATScloud allows data to be recovered over the WAN and also has an export appliance recovery procedure. ODS allows data to be recovered over the WAN and can also ship the ExaGrid system with just your organization’s data to the physical DR site.
Distributed Data Center Sites:
ExaGrid supports replication between distributed data centers. ExaGrid supports up to 16 data centers in a group with 15 spokes to a hub. ExaGrid supports cross-replication between sites.
Backups can occur at any or all of the 16 data centers in a group, 15 spokes to a hub. Typically the hub is the site with the largest amount of data, the most bandwidth, or both. Backups occur at each spoke site and are replicated to the hub site for disaster recovery. The hub site replicates its backups to one or more of the spoke sites for disaster recovery. All data center locations can be a corporate data center or rented rack space in a third-party hosting facility.
ExaGrid allows for backup jobs to be targeted at any number of NAS shares in order to group backups. On a single system, an individual NAS share can be replicated point to point to a site versus all backup data being replicated to the same site.
ExaGrid can replicate over both low and high latency hops, allowing replication to occur to sites anywhere in the world.
Multi-site replication is highly bandwidth efficient. On a week-to-week basis, approximately 2% of the data changes at the byte level and therefore only 1/50th of the data needs to be transferred. ExaGrid’s deduplication requires about 1/50th of the bandwidth versus transferring undeduplicated backup data.
Many of ExaGrid’s North American sites replicate to Europe, Japan, China, Singapore, Thailand, and many other locations. Many European customers replicate to sites in North America. Many Asia Pacific customers replicate to European locations.
All systems, regardless of where they are located, are managed by a single user interface using Internet Explorer, Chrome, or Firefox.