ExaGrid Systems announced its new EX10000E 10TB disk backup system and an upgrade to its GRID software which expands the maximum number of servers in a GRID configuration to 10 (ten). The new appliance and enhanced GRID software allow customers to store a 100TB full backup in a single GRID-based disk-backup system with data deduplication. The EX10000E will be available by the end of October for a base price beginning at $85,900. For existing customers with active maintenance and support contracts, software upgrades to expand the maximum number of servers in a GRID to 10 servers are no cost.
In addition to the EX10000E's backup capacity, the new system provides high performance by writing to disk at full disk speed (post-processing) and by adding complete servers in a GRID for system expansion, instead of just more disk capacity. This scalable GRID-based approach maintains fast backup performance even as data grows. ExaGrid is also uniquely fast for restore performance as it stores the most recent backup in its complete, non-deduplicated form ready for rapid restoration or tape copies.
They sell to mid-size enterprises, customers have 1 - 100 TB of data to be backed up every night. Smaller data sets than big enterprise. EMC, Data Domain, Quantum are in place. Not in the SMB space with less than a terabyte of data. The user environment is such that they typically have email server, app server, db server, etc. All the data is backed up every night using a backup server running any of a number of packages. They sit behind the backup server to help store all the data.
According to Bill Hobbib, vice president of marketing for Exagrid, many companies today are backing up to tape, even though practically everyone hates tape. A typical potential customer, Hobbib says, may be doing an off-site copy every week. They may move to using Exagrid for on-site backup, then de-duping and backing up off-site once a week. Exagrid lets them store the changed data each day.
"There has been a single controller model that allowed customers to smoothly go to 30 TB or move to 60 TB with a forklift upgrade," he says, adding that, "The Exagrid model is much more scalable."
