ExaGrid Systems, Inc.: Tiered Backup Storage for Data Protection
ExaGrid Systems, Inc. is a private American data storage company that specializes in developing and marketing Tiered Backup Storage solutions. Headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts, the company was founded in 2002 with the mission of solving the critical challenges associated with traditional data backup storage, such as slow backups, lengthy restore times, and costly system scalability. ExaGrid's core competency lies in its unique architecture, which integrates compute, capacity, and a disk-cache landing zone to deliver superior performance for backup, recovery, and ransomware resilience.
What the Company Does
ExaGrid operates within the enterprise data storage industry, focusing exclusively on disk-based backup with data deduplication. The company's primary business is to replace or augment traditional disk and tape solutions for data retention. The proprietary architecture is specifically engineered to address the three primary bottlenecks in the backup process: backup performance (the backup window), restore performance, and scalability as data grows.
The fundamental innovation is the Tiered Backup Storage approach, which is comprised of two distinct tiers: the Disk-Cache Landing Zone and the Repository Tier. This two-tiered system differentiates ExaGrid from other deduplication appliances that perform deduplication inline???a process that slows down the backup as it is being written.
Products and Services
ExaGrid's offering is centered around its line of physical backup storage appliances, which run its proprietary software and combine to form a single, unified scale-out system. The appliance models offer various capacities to suit different organizational sizes and data growth rates.
1. Tiered Backup Storage Appliances
The physical product is a backup appliance that includes a mix of processing power (compute), memory, and disk capacity, running the ExaGrid software. The appliances are designed to be deployed in a scale-out architecture, offering:
Disk-Cache Landing Zone: This is the high-speed front-end tier where the most recent backups are written directly to disk without any inline deduplication processing. This strategy ensures the shortest possible backup window???often up to three times faster than competing solutions???because the system avoids slowing down the ingest process. Furthermore, the most recent backup remains in its native, undeduplicated format, enabling the fastest possible restores, instant VM boots, and tape copies without the "data rehydration" penalty seen with inline deduplication products.
Repository Tier: This is the long-term retention tier, which stores all the historical, deduplicated backup data. Data from the Landing Zone is moved here asynchronously, using ExaGrid's Adaptive Deduplication process, which performs the deduplication and replication in parallel with the backup. This post-process deduplication ensures that all system resources are available for the backup process during the backup window. The deduplication process stores only byte-level changes from backup to backup, drastically reducing the storage footprint and lowering the cost for long-term retention.
2. Unique Scale-Out Architecture
ExaGrid utilizes a scale-out GRID architecture that allows IT organizations to "buy as they grow." Instead of merely adding disk shelves, ExaGrid customers add a full appliance to the system, which includes the necessary compute (processor, memory, and bandwidth) along with capacity.
Fixed-Length Backup Window: By adding compute resources with capacity in every appliance, the backup window remains a fixed length as the data volume increases, eliminating the product obsolescence and disruptive, costly "forklift upgrades" inherent in traditional scale-up storage solutions.
Single System Scalability: Multiple ExaGrid appliances (up to 32) of any size or age can be combined into a single scale-out system, which is virtualized and appears as one large pool of storage to the backup application. This configuration can support full backups up to 2PB (with up to 4.6PB raw capacity).
3. Ransomware Resilience and Recovery
A key service embedded in the appliance is a comprehensive solution for ransomware recovery, referred to as Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery. This unique approach utilizes a non-network-facing architecture and process to protect the backup data, ensuring it cannot be targeted or encrypted by a malicious attack on the production network.
Non-Network-Facing Tier (Air-Gap): The Repository Tier is not network-facing, meaning the deduplicated, long-term retention data is physically segregated from the production network path accessible to a ransomware attack.
Immutable Objects and Delayed Deletes: The system utilizes immutable data deduplication objects and a feature for delayed delete requests. Even if a hacker deletes the active backup data in the Landing Zone, the retained, deduplicated data in the Repository Tier remains intact and recoverable due to the non-network-facing tier and the delayed deletion mechanism.
4. Broad Ecosystem Compatibility
ExaGrid???s appliances are designed to work seamlessly with a vast ecosystem of over 25 industry-leading backup applications, utilities, and database dumps, including major solutions like Veeam, Veritas NetBackup, Commvault, Oracle RMAN, and others. This heterogeneous support allows organizations to utilize their existing backup software investments without requiring major changes to their backup infrastructure.
The combination of the Disk-Cache Landing Zone, Adaptive Deduplication, and the Scale-Out Architecture positions ExaGrid as a leader in Tiered Backup Storage, providing high-performance backup and recovery capabilities along with superior cost-effectiveness and scalability for long-term data retention.
Please note: This information is generated by AI. For legal use, verify with company sources.
