ExaGrid aces disk-to-disk backup

Infoworld - For enterprises seeking to escape the challenges of managing and maintaining tape backup architectures, disk-to-disk backup has been nothing short of a godsend. By replacing tape with disk for nightly backups and relegating tape to a long-term archival role, organizations of all sizes can shrink backup windows and provide near-instantaneous restores. While simple direct-attached storage may fit the bill for smaller organizations, larger enterprises wrestling with the task of protecting terabytes of data find themselves looking for functionality that plain old disk can't provide.

That's where deduplicating backup appliances really shine. While there are a number of well-known vendors with very strong product offerings in this space (EMC Data Domain and Quantum, to name two), ExaGrid's unique scale-out grid architecture and truly refreshing support model set it apart from the pack and place it in a class of its own.

To say that deduplication technology is "hot" is something of an understatement. With rapidly growing mountains of data, leveraging dedupe in backup (if not primary storage) has almost become a necessity. However, as sexy as deduplication tech may be, it's reached a point where the major dedupe vendors are, by and large, getting the same data reduction results from their deduplication engines. Today the differences reside mainly in the impact the deduplication engine has on backup and restore performance and how well the solution scales as backup data inexorably grows. This is where ExaGrid has chosen to invest the bulk of its R&D.