Tiered Backup Storage
With ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage, each appliance in the system brings with it not only disk, but also memory, bandwidth, and processing power, all the elements needed to maintain high backup performance. The patented disk-cache Landing Zone and Adaptive Deduplication technology ensure the fastest backup and recoveries and efficient long-term retention. ExaGrid works with all leading backup applications.
ExaGrid's scale-out architecture keeps the backup window short as data grows, since growth is accommodated by simply adding additional appliances to the system. Get the shortest possible backup times with the ability to easily keep those times short as your data grows over time.
Product Architecture
ExaGrid understands that both backup and restore performance are crucial to backups, but that long-term storage costs for longer retention is crucial as well. Data deduplication is required, but how you implement it changes everything in backup. Data deduplication reduces the amount of storage required and also the amount of bandwidth for replication; however, if not implemented correctly, it will dramatically slow down backups, slow down restores and VM boots, and the backup window will grow as data grows. This is due to the fact that data deduplication is highly compute intensive; you don’t want to perform deduplication during the backup window and you also don’t want to restore or boot from a pool of deduplicated data.
ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage provides the fastest backup and restore performance with a disk-cache Landing Zone. In addition, ExaGrid provides a tiered long-term retention deduplicated data repository with the best level of data deduplication. The combination of a disk-cache Landing Zone tiered to a long-term retention repository with deduplicated data provides 6X the backup performance and up to 20X the restore and VM boot performance over traditional inline deduplication appliances. ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage with a disk-cache Landing Zone lands backups straight to disk without any inline deduplication processing. Backups are fast and the backup window is short. Deduplication and offsite replication occur in parallel with the backups and never impede the backup process as they are always second order priority. ExaGrid calls this “adaptive deduplication.”
- Exagrid provides fastest backups within the shortest backup windows. Since backups write directly to the Landing Zone, the most recent backups are in their full, undeduplicated form ready for any request supporting even instant VM recoveries within minutes or tape copies if necessary.
- ExaGrid is extremely scalable, allowing you to simply pay as you grow by adding the appropriately sized appliances as your data grows. ExaGrid systems can be mixed and matched in a single system, which allows customers to buy compute and capacity as they need it.
Scalability
ExaGrid offers a series of various-sized backup storage appliance models that can be mixed and matched in a scale-out secondary storage for backup system. Any size or age appliance can co-exist in the same system and can scale from a 3TB full backup to a 2PB full backup in a single system. The system is flexible since the proper size appliances can be added as data grows. This eliminates the need for up-front planning and allows customers to expand the ExaGrid system as their data grows.
- The unique disk-cache Landing Zone allows for the fastest backups and the fastest restores, recoveries, and tape copies.
- The unique scale-out approach is the only solution that provides a fixed-length backup window regardless of data growth, negating the need for expensive forklift upgrades.
- The ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage system allows for replication to a second site for disaster recovery as well as the ability to allow multiple data centers to cross-protect between each other.
- The ExaGrid approach allows you to simply pay as you grow by adding the appropriate sized appliances as data volumes increase.
- All appliances are managed by a single user interface.
Data Deduplication
ExaGrid uses zone-level deduplication, including full server appliances in a scale-out hyper-converged solution, which results in the fastest backup and restore performance at the lowest price. ExaGrid’s approach also supports a wide range of backup application support. ExaGrid system can work with any backup application and can easily scale, resulting in a fixed-length backup window regardless of data growth.
- As data grows, then ExaGrid doubles, triples, and quadruples the processor, memory, bandwidth, and disk so that as data grows, the backup window stays at a fixed length.
- Exagrid’s zone approach is backup application agnostic, allowing ExaGrid to support virtually any backup application.
- ExaGrid’s approach does not maintain a very large, ever-growing hash table and, therefore, avoids the need for expensive flash to accelerate hash table look-ups, keeping the cost of the hardware low.
Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery
Ransomware attacks are on the rise, becoming disruptive and potentially very costly to businesses. No matter how meticulously an organization follows best practices to protect valuable data, the attackers seem to stay one step ahead. They maliciously encrypt primary data, take control of the backup application and delete the backup data. The challenge is how to protect the backup data from being deleted while at the same time allowing for backup retention to be purged when retention points are hit.
ExaGrid’s approach to ransomware allows organizations to set up a time lock period that delays the processing of any delete requests in the Retention Tier as that tier is not network facing and not accessible to hackers. The combination of a non-network facing tier, a delayed deletion for a period of time and immutable objects that cannot be changed or modified are the elements of the ExaGrid Retention Time-Lock solution. This provides organizations days and week to identify that they have an issue and restore.
Exagrid Appliances
ExaGrid offers various-sized appliance models that can be mixed and matched with up to 32 appliances in a single scale-out system. The largest scale-out system can take in up to a 2PB full backup with an ingest rate of 432TB/hr. This is 3X faster than any other backup storage on the market.
| ExaGrid Model | Raw Capacity (TB) | Usable Capacity (TB) | Capacity for Weekly Fulls (TB) |
|---|---|---|---|
| EX3000 | 12 | 6 | 3 |
| EX5000 | 16 | 10 | 5 |
| EX7000 | 20 | 14 | 7 |
| EX10000E | 32 | 20 | 10 |
| EX13000E | 40 | 28 | 13 |
| EX21000E | 60 | 42 | 21 |
| EX32000E | 84 | 66 | 32 |
| EX40000E | 96 | 78 | 40 |
| EX63000E | 144 | 126 | 63 |
Any ExaGrid appliance can be mixed and matched in the same scale-out system with any other size or age appliance, allowing customers to buy what they need as they need it. This pay-as-you-grow model allows up to 32 appliances in a single scale-out system.
All appliances and systems are managed by a single user interface. Multiple systems can be deployed in a single site, which allows for full backups up to petabytes.
Exagrid Supported Backup Applications
ExaGrid supports a wide variety of backup applications, utilities, and database dumps. In addition, ExaGrid allows multiple approaches within the same environment. A customer can use one backup application for their physical servers, a different backup application or utility for their virtual environment, and also perform direct Microsoft SQL or Oracle RMAN database dumps, all to the same ExaGrid system.
If for some reason you decide to change your backup applications in the future, ExaGrid system will still work, protecting your initial investment.
ExaGrid supports many unique features and interfaces such as improved performance for Veritas Backup Exec GRT, AIR for Veritas NetBackup, OST for Veritas Backup Exec and Veritas NetBackup, and an integrated Veeam Data Mover for Veeam.
ExaGrid is the only solution that provides a unique landing zone that maintains full copies of the most recent backups from all backup applications, utilities, and dumps so that restores, recoveries, and tape copies are as fast as reading from disk.
Exagrid + Veeam integrated solution
Veeam and ExaGrid combine to provide customers agility, Availability and business acceleration. ExaGrid EX Series appliances include a non-deduplicated landing zone and Veeam Accelerated Data Mover which completes Veeam backups and Instant VM Recovery® operations up to three times faster than standard deduplication appliances.
The combination of Veeam software solutions with ExaGrid appliance technology delivers the fastest full-system restores and leading support for Veeam features like Instant VM Recovery, SureBackup® and Veeam DataLabs™ to provide the following:
- Faster backups and data processing compared to standard deduplication appliances
- No deduplication processes that slow down data processing
- Shorter backup window
- Quicker restores and Instant VM Recovery support
Veeam Cloud Data Management integrates with ExaGrid systems, enabling customers to maximize business value by leveraging data-deduplication appliances optimized for performance, scalability and price to preserve digital assets over an entire lifecycle
Exagrid + Veritas Netbackup
Customers deploying ExaGrid disk backup along with their NetBackup software can get 3x faster backups and 20x faster restores, dramatically reduced backup windows, and significantly lower cost of storage.
ExaGrid is certified as supporting:
- NetBackup OpenStorage Technology (OST),
- Optimized Deduplication,
- NetBackup A.I.R.
- NetBackup Accelerator OST features.
ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage leverages the performance of low-cost primary storage disk with the economic benefits of data deduplication.
ExaGrid is the only storage for backup solution in the market that automatically resynthesizes NetBackup Accelerator backups, maintaining a full copy ready to restore at 20x faster than any other solution, including Veritas appliances. With a lower cost up front and a lower cost over time, the ExaGrid cost-effective scale-out growth model makes your NetBackup implementation a high-performance, scalable, efficient end-to-end solution.
Not only does ExaGrid support the use of NetBackup Accelerator, but it takes it to the next level by not just presenting a full image from incremental updates. ExaGrid actually will write a synthetic full backup in the Landing Zone. This synthetic full backup will provide a much quicker platform to recover from than a synthetic image which is deduplicated.
Exagrid + Oracle
Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) users can efficiently protect and recover databases with a lower cost up front and a lower cost over time using ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage. Customers can simply send Oracle backups via the RMAN utility set directly to ExaGrid disk-cache Landing Zone so that database backups are written straight to disk.
ExaGrid offers the best of both worlds by providing the most recent backups in a non-deduplcated format for fast restores, but also delivers a 10 to 50:1 deduplication ratio for low-cost, long-term retention storage.
ExaGrid enables the fastest Oracle RMAN Backups with Performance Load Balancing utilizing Oracle RMAN Channels. With ExaGrid’s Oracle RMAN Channels integration, ExaGrid customers get built-in performance load balancing, and global deduplication across all systems.
