Exagrid provides Tiered Backup Storage with a unique Landing Zone and scale-out architecture, offering the fastest backups and restores for enterprise IT.
Exagrid provides Tiered Backup Storage with a unique Landing Zone and scale-out architecture, offering the fastest backups and restores for enterprise IT.
Exagrid is a leading provider of Tiered Backup Storage solutions designed to solve the performance and scalability challenges inherent in traditional disk-based backup with data deduplication. Founded in 2002 and headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts, Exagrid has established itself as a critical player in the data protection market, specifically focusing on the "storage" component of the backup ecosystem.
The company’s core offering is a scale-out hardware appliance that integrates seamlessly with over 25 industry-leading backup applications and utilities. While traditional backup storage solutions often struggle with "rehydration" delays and shrinking backup windows as data grows, Exagrid’s architecture utilizes a unique disk-cache Landing Zone and a separate Repository Tier. This dual-tier approach allows for high-speed ingest and rapid restores while maintaining the cost-efficiency of long-term deduplicated data storage.
Exagrid serves mid-market to large enterprise organizations, as well as government and public sector entities. Their market presence is global, with thousands of customers and a reputation for high reliability and customer satisfaction. The company does not provide the backup software itself; instead, it provides the optimized hardware target that makes software like Veeam, Commvault, Veritas NetBackup, and others perform at their peak. By focusing exclusively on the storage side of the backup equation, Exagrid has carved out a niche as a high-performance alternative to general-purpose storage and legacy deduplication appliances.
Company Differentiation
Exagrid differentiates itself through a business model and company culture centered on "customer-first" engineering and financial transparency. Unlike many storage giants that rely on frequent forced upgrades, Exagrid offers a "Price Protection" guarantee and a "No Obsolescence" policy, ensuring that units purchased years ago can still be supported and integrated with current models. This approach fosters long-term trust and reduces the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the enterprise.
The company culture is rooted in deep technical expertise rather than aggressive sales tactics. This is evidenced by their unique customer support model: every customer is assigned a senior Level 2 support engineer who is an expert in specific backup applications (such as Veeam, Commvault, or Veritas). This eliminates the frustration of tiered support queues and ensures that customers work with a specialist who understands their entire backup ecosystem, not just the storage hardware. This philosophy of "partnering" with the customer’s existing infrastructure rather than trying to own the entire stack makes Exagrid a highly collaborative player in the data center. Their focus remains narrow and disciplined—they do one thing (tiering backup storage) and aim to do it better than general-purpose storage providers.
ExaGrid offers a range of appliance models that can be mixed and matched:
EX Series Appliances: Ranging from the EX6 (6TB raw) to the EX189 (189TB raw).
Scale-Out Grid: Up to 32 appliances can be combined into a single scale-out system, providing a total capacity of up to 6PB of full backup in a single system.
SEC (Secure) Models: All appliance sizes are available in "SEC" versions, which include FIPS-compliant Self-Encrypting Drives (SEDs).
ExaGrid Cloud Tier: An option to replicate deduplicated data to AWS or Azure for long-term offsite retention or disaster recovery.
Maintenance & Support Packages: Comprehensive support including an assigned Level 2 engineer, proactive monitoring, and all software updates.
Product Differentiation
Exagrid’s primary product differentiator is its Tiered Backup Storage architecture, which stands in stark contrast to the inline deduplication appliances offered by competitors like Dell Data Domain. Exagrid utilizes a unique "Landing Zone"—a non-deduplicated disk cache where the most recent backups are written directly. This allows for the fastest possible backup performance and, more importantly, near-instantaneous data restores and VM boots because the data does not need to be "rehydrated" from a deduplicated state.
Key technical advantages include:
- **Scale-Out Architecture:** Unlike "scale-up" systems that require disruptive forklift upgrades when the controller reaches capacity, Exagrid adds full appliances (including processor, memory, and network ports) to a single scale-out system. This ensures a fixed-length backup window regardless of data growth.
- **Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery:** Exagrid employs a non-network-facing tier (a tiered air gap) with delayed deletes and immutable data objects. This ensures that even if a backup application is compromised, the long-term retention data remains secure and recoverable.
- **Global Deduplication:** Data is deduplicated across all appliances in a system, maximizing storage efficiency without sacrificing the performance of the Landing Zone.
- **Adaptive Deduplication:** Deduplication and replication occur in parallel with backups, ensuring the highest level of data consistency at the disaster recovery site without bottlenecking the primary backup ingest.
Media
Exagrid Software Details
ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage: Faster Backups and Ransomware Recovery
