12 Ways That Only ExaGrid Protects Your Backup Storage Investment From Obsolescence.

When organizations evaluate the backup solution and company that can best meet their backup needs and address their challenges, more and more IT organizations are finding that ExaGrid offers not only the fastest backup and restore performance and best scalability but also a total cost of ownership that is 25 - 30% lower than competitive offerings.

Only ExaGrid’s unique GRID architecture and adaptive deduplication provides:

1) Shortest Backup Window 

? Back up straight to disk for high performance. 

? All other solutions perform inline deduplication, slowing the backups down. 

? All other solutions slow further if you additionally turn on replication and/or encryption as it takes resources from the processor performing the deduplication. 

? Each appliance has additional bandwidth so that as data grows, so does the throughput. 

? All other solutions have a front-end controller with fixed bandwidth up front and over time.

2) Fixed Length Backup Window

Each appliance has capacity and also compute to handle the increased deduplication load. 

? All other solutions only add capacity and have fixed compute up front and over time. 

? Each appliance has additional bandwidth so that as data grows, so does the required network bandwidth. 

? All other solutions have a front-end controller with fixed bandwidth up front and over time. 

3) No Forklift Upgrades

Capacity is always accompanied by compute to bring additional resources as data grows. 

? All other solutions have a front-end controller with fixed compute and only add capacity.

4) Pay as You Grow

Up to 25 appliances can be mixed and matched in a single GRID system – buy what you need as you need it. 

? All other solutions have a front-end controller – either overbuy up front or require a forklift upgrade later.

5) No Obsolescence

Appliances of all sizes and all ages can be used in a single GRID. Newer appliances work in the same GRID as older appliances.   

? All other solutions have countless models over the years, leaving customers hanging.

6) Fast Onsite Restores

Unique landing zone keeps the most recent backups in their full form for fast and immediate restores. 

? All other solutions only store deduplicated/dehydrated data that needs to be reassembled for every restore.

7) Fast Offsite Tape Copy

Unique landing zone keeps the most recent backups in their full form for fast and immediate tape copy. 

? All other solutions only store deduplicated/dehydrated data that needs to be reassembled for every tape copy.

8) Fastest Onsite VM Instant Recovery

Unique landing zone keeps the most recent backups in their full form in order to boot a VM directly off the ExaGrid landing zone for Instant Recovery. 

? All other solutions require a lengthier process to rehydrate the offsite disaster recovery data.

9) Fastest Disaster Recovery

Offsite data is stored in a unique format optimized for fast DR performance. 

? All other solutions require a lengthier process to rehydrate the offsite DR data.

10) Asymmetrical Onsite and Offsite Systems

If the replication is one way to a DR site and there are no backups at the DR site, the ExaGrid system can be tuned to 100% repository, allowing for a half-size system at the DR site which saves valuable  budget dollars. 

? All other solutions require the exact same size system at both sites.

11) Distributed Architecture

There are multiple appliances in a GRID each with processor, memory, bandwidth, and disk. If an appliance fails, backup jobs targeted at the remaining appliances in the GRID will continue to run. 

? All other solutions will be 100% inoperable as there is a single head-end controller, and if the head-end controller goes down, the entire system is unavailable.

12) Supports Heterogeneous Environments 

? Multiple backup applications, utilities, and dumps can be sent to a single ExaGrid. A customer can have one backup application for their physical environment, a separate backup application for their VM environment, and also do direct database dumps such as SQL dump or Oracle RMAN.

If you've read this far, thank you! You now know more than most of your peers about how backup storage can work better, can better align with your business unit's needs, and can do it in a much more budget friendly and predictable way.

If you would like me to connect you with an ExaGrid technical resource, to see if we may fit into your current or future needs, please let me know.

Remember, 1) It's ONLY a job. 2) Life is better when you work smarter rather than harder, to accomplish the same results.

Have a great day!