ExaGrid

ExaGrid is a company that provides disk-based backup solutions. Their primary product is a tiered backup storage system designed to offer faster backups, restores, and VM boots. The system works by incorporating a landing zone, which is a cache of the most recent backups in their full undeduplicated format. This allows for rapid restores and immediate VM boots, as data does not need to be rehydrated from deduplicated storage.

The ExaGrid system is architected as a scale-out solution. As data grows, customers can add appliances to the system, which increases both storage capacity and backup performance. Each appliance contains a processor, memory, and network ports, along with disk storage. This distributed architecture allows the system to maintain a consistent backup performance regardless of the amount of data stored.

ExaGrid's approach differentiates itself from traditional deduplication solutions by performing deduplication and offsite data copying in parallel with the backups. This process, which ExaGrid calls "adaptive deduplication," avoids performance bottlenecks often associated with front-end deduplication. The system also offers data retention policies, allowing older data to be stored in a deduplicated format for long-term archiving. The company targets a range of organizations, from small businesses to large enterprises, looking for efficient and performant backup storage.