ExaGrid
The Data Backup and Recovery Stalwart

Bill Andrews, President and CEO

The situation calls for a robust backup storage solution that can scale with data growth while ensuring that data can be recovered in case of ransomware attacks.

ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage solution is built to address these challenges. ExaGrid provides Tiered Backup Storage with a disk-cache Landing Zone, a long-term retention repository, and a scale-out architecture. While the Landing Zone provides the fastest backups, restores, and recovery, the Repository Tier offers the lowest cost for long-term retention. The scale-out architecture includes full appliances and ensures a fixed-length backup window as the data grows, eliminating expensive forklift upgrades and product obsolescence.

Its two-tiered backup storage approach—the combination of a network-facing Landing Zone with a non-network-facing Repository Tier—enables complete recovery from ransomware attacks.

"We neither oversell our solution nor undersize it by giving a huge discount. The combination of honesty and an ethical approach always wins"

The benefit of storing deduplicated data in a non-network-facing tier is that it creates a tiered air gap, which makes it inaccessible to threat actors. The ExaGrid system employs a delayed delete policy, ensuring that the data deleted in the Landing Zone during ransomware attacks are not immediately removed from the Repository Tier. The data is not affected by malicious encryption during an attack because all data in the ExaGrid Repository Tier is stored as immutable objects, which means it cannot be overwritten or modified. This protects the most recent backups and all retention points.

ExaGrid also focuses on disaster recovery. It has the capability to replicate data from the primary site to the disaster recovery site with minimal bandwidth use. More importantly, it allows clients to recover data at their own second data center or on their cloud platform of choice.

ExaGrid understands that inline deduplication appliances allow for advanced data deduplication, significantly reducing backup storage costs for long-term retention.

However, the data deduplication is typically performed on the way to the disk, which slows down backups.Even deduplication software, running on a media server, cannot improve performance according to user expectations.

To solve the ingest performance issue, ExaGrid backs up data directly to the Landing Zone, instead of using inline deduplication. It also optimizes the file system for large backup jobs and uses advanced protocols for performance improvement. Using job concurrency for parallel backups, and integrated backup application functionality for front-end job load balancing (Veeam SOBR, Veritas NetBackup Disk Pooling, Oracle RMAN Channels, and Commvault Spill & Fill), ExaGrid further improves backup performance.

“Our backup solution is better than SSDs, and not just because of the speed but due to the benefits we provide,” says Bill Andrews, president and CEO of ExaGrid. “We use self-encrypting drives from Seagate, Western Digital, and other leading manufacturers to perform encryption at rest in nanoseconds which further increases backup performance.”
Another focus for ExaGrid is restore performance. With the most recent backups stored in the Landing Zone in an unduplicated format, users can boot a VM in a minute or two instead of waiting hours to rehydrate data from a deduplicated dataset. Simultaneously, the processor, memory, and disk included in each ExaGrid appliance allow ExaGrid systems to scale linearly with a client’s growing datasets.

Customer Service is the Key

The ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage solution is available across the globe, including APAC, Europe, and the Americas. Undoubtedly, the unmatched capabilities of its solution have been the biggest contributor to the company’s success. To complement this, it has built exceptional customer support teams across the globe. Each customer works with the same senior support engineer every time, who is proficient in the local language and knows the client’s backup application, business and their challenges. These factors have enabled ExaGrid to maintain a 95 percent customer retention rate.

Currently, 99.2 percent of its customers are on maintenance and support. The company also has a +81 NPS score, an achievement in an industry where the standard ranges from 20 to 30. All of this nets out to a high customer retention of 95%.

A large holding company in the U.S. was using market-leading solutions for data backup, but due to backup jobs exceeding the given window, ended up having to shut backup jobs off, leaving them exposed and unable to recover data in the event of attack or disaster. After switching to ExaGrid, their backups finished 12 hours sooner and fit well within the given window, allowing them to maintain a better backup schedule for increased data protection.

Our backup solution is better than SSDs, and it is not just because of the speed but the benefits we provide

“We neither oversell our solution nor undersize it by giving a huge discount,” says Andrews. “The combination of honesty and an ethical approach always wins.”

The ExaGrid team cares about its clients. They are passionate and never hesitate to make the right decision.

“This is the reason why word-of-mouth has become the key to our customer acquisition strategy,” says Andrews.

While backup storage recoveries can often be cumbersome, businesses increasingly need quick access to their critical data in case of a catastrophe. ExaGrid is a perfect partner in this regard. It not only provides a robust solution but aligns with the evolving market and customer needs. Going forward, ExaGrid is increasing its focus on Fortune 500 companies and has installations in over 40 Fortune 500 organizations to date, helping them securely back up huge amounts of data. Simultaneously, it will hone its capabilities to support clients, wherever their data resides—on-premise in the data center, private cloud, public cloud, SaaS providers, MSPs, or IT outsourcers.

You can view more than 300 published customer success stories on the ExaGrid website (https://www.exagrid.com/exagrid-customers/success-stories/) that feature customers in different verticals, and lists the company name as well as the customer name and job title, and includes a two-page story of what challenges were overcome.