ExaGrid EX63000E

ExaGrid has always been a great choice for enterprise backup because the EX appliance family delivers everything that is required to stay within your backup window and its budget

Whereas many solutions are based around a single head unit and dumb expansion shelves, each EX appliance is a complete compute system with CPUs, memory, networking and disks.

This approach delivers a smart scale-out solution allowing customers to purchase extra capacity as demand increases, without impacting performance. Even more appealing is ExaGrid's price protection. It guarantees that ongoing maintenance costs won't be increased by more than 3 per cent annually and the price you pay for your first appliance will be applied to additional units of the same model purchased during the following five years.

ExaGrid is all about choice. Any of its nine EX models can be combined to form a single scale-out system of up to 32 appliances. We are reviewing the flagship EX63000E which delivers an enormous backup capacity of 63TB, but you can tailor expansion to your budget by adding further appliances that precisely match your backup requirements.

ExaGrid's data deduplication technology is designed to avoid the backup and restore performance compromises that many other solutions suffer from. Its appliances present a Landing Zone where data received from the backup application is written to (not deduplicated), allowing the EX63000E to claim an industry-leading ingest rate of up to 432TB/hr for a 2PB full backup.

Along with the Landing Zone, data is also written to an appliance retention space during backup operations where it is compressed and deduplicated. This dual approach has significant performance advantages as the Landing Zone can accelerate restore operations by up to 20 times as data doesn't require rehydration and decompression.

Deployment was swift and appliances are 100 per cent customer installable and usually implemented in one hour with initial backups occurring the same day. The appliances present their storage as CIFS or NFS shares and are very flexible as ExaGrid supports over 25 leading backup applications.

Not content to rest on its laurels, ExaGrid has implemented a raft of new features in its latest v5.2.2 software. Commvault fans will approve as they can keep its deduplication feature enabled and allow ExaGrid to deduplicate backup data further on its target storage, with combined reduction ratios improved to an impressive 20:1.

Veeam users get the same benefits as ExaGrid works with its integral deduplication. It also provides Veeam 'dedupe friendly' compression. ExaGrid has improved its Veeam deduplication algorithms to offer industry-leading reduction ratios of 20:1, and its Landing Zone allows Veeam VMs to be booted in seconds, as opposed to the hours that traditional inline solutions take due to having to rehydrate data first.

The new features keep on coming as ExaGrid supports Veritas' NetBackup Accelerator, which works to reduce backup windows by only sending changes for incremental and full backups. ExaGrid can deduplicate NetBackup Accelerator data and reconstitute it into the appliance's Landing Zone to provide instant VM boots, fast offsite tape copies and, of course, quick data restore operations.

There's more, as ExaGrid's management GUI now integrates with Active Directory for tighter access security and it is also available for CIFS target share access control and the Veeam Data Mover. ExaGrid has also improved its deduplication algorithm for changed block tracking (CBT) and incremental backups while global deduplication is supported across all shares and appliances in its scale-out architecture.

Enterprises faced with growing storage demands and shrinking backup windows will find ExaGrid's EX appliances to be the perfect solution. Easily deployed, highly flexible and high performing: scale-out storage simply doesn't get any more versatile or affordable than this. NC

Product: EX63000E
Supplier: ExaGrid
Web site: www.exagrid.com
Telephone: +44 (0) 1189 497 051 or +1 800 868 6985
Email : info@exagrid.com
Price : Contact a local reseller or integrator