ExaGrid Pushes Backup And Disaster Recovery Appliances To 13 Terabytes

ExaGrid Systems Inc., which makes a disk-based backup and disaster recovery appliance that includes deduplication and replication functionality, has announced a 13-terabyte model, the EX13000E. Because users can use them to build grids of up to 10 devices, the new model means network administrators can now build a grid with a capacity of up to 130 TB, which is a 30 percent improvement over one built with the company's existing products. The device also has half the power and cooling requirements of previous models, and now offers an encryption option, though the company is not formally announcing it at this time.

Jason O'Dell, vice president and IT manager for GreenBank, Tennessee's third-largest bank, based in Greeneville, has been using ExaGrid for a couple of years, choosing it over competitors due to its lower price, and has been using the 13-TB appliance since April. As larger models are released, he adds them and rotates out the older, smaller appliances.

"We increasingly went with larger units each time to extend the amount of backup storage we have," he says, adding that they now have 46 TB in the grid. Currently, he is having to keep backed-up data longer than with his normal rotation, because the bank is under a legal hold due to a class-action lawsuit.

The bank also deduplicates and replicates its data to another bank facility in Knoxville. The deduplication features in the ExaGrid devices give him a 10 to 1 reduction overall, and up to a 46 to 1 reduction with some data such as SQL databases, he says.

ExaGrid targets its products at the small to midmarket enterprise, says Marc Crspi, vice president of product management for the Westborough, Mass., company. Typically, ExaGrid works with user organizations to help them determine the storage they need, based on factors such as how many weeks of backup data they wish to keep on hand, he says. Unlike some competing storage vendors, ExaGrid doesn't use a "tier" system that requires users to update controllers when storage goes over a certain size, he adds.The platform gives ExaGrid systems more capacity, performance, and scale, as well as improved environmental features such as power and cooling, putting the company in a firmer competitive position, says Robert Armatruda, research director for data protection and recovery at International Data Corp., a Framingham, Mass., consultancy. The new nodes offer greater capacity choices, and have a dense footprint, as well as offering 33 percent faster performance, which extends the value of the grid architecture by allowing for more choice in terms of expansion sizes and upper-end capacity, agrees Dave Russell, research vice president of storage technologies and strategies for Gartner Inc., a Stamford, Conn., consultancy.

The product is available now starting at $69,900 and works with a variety of backup applications and utilities, including CA ARCserve, CommVault Simpana, HP Data Protector, Linux/Unix File System Data Dumps, Microsoft SQL dump, Oracle Recovery Manager, EMC NetWorker, Symantec Backup Exec, Symantec NetBackup, Veeam Backup & Replication (announced earlier this year), Quest vRanger, and VMware Backup.

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