ExaGrid Systems, Inc., provider of disk-based backup solutions with data deduplication, has announced it has upgraded its EX1000–EX5000 line of products. The new, smaller EX1000–EX5000 models feature improvements that increase performance from 25 percent up to 160 percent, and also reduce rack space, power, and cooling requirements by as much as 54 percent, the company said.

As with all new platform introductions, ExaGrid has ensured existing customers can seamlessly use the new appliances alongside existing EX1000 to EX-10000E appliances already installed.

“By reducing the size of ExaGrid’s form factor and speeding the ability to ingest data, we now deliver even faster, more efficient backups to our customers,” said Marc Crespi, vice president of product management for ExaGrid. “These hardware upgrades allow customers to better manage green IT initiatives by requiring less space and lower power and cooling costs," he said.

"The sleeker design frees up rack space, while the new appliances still fit within our highly scalable GRID architecture," said Crespi. "This gives our customers a ‘mix and match’ capability to use newer appliances and avoid technology obsolescence and forklift upgrades experienced with competitive disk backup appliances.”

The enhancements to the EX1000–EX5000 include hardware improvements to processors and I/O subsystems, as well as enhanced memory and connectivity. ExaGrid’s 1TB through 4TB appliances are now available in a 2U size instead of the previous 3U size, and the new products offer the most space and energy-efficient disk-based backup with deduplication solution for customers in their class for the mid-market, according to the company.

“Due to rapidly increasing data, we recently added a second ExaGrid to our initial system,” said Greg Wade, network engineer for Jackson County Intermediate School District. “The new model we added is smaller in terms of physical size and the amount of rack space it requires. Despite the different form factor, it easily harmonized with our existing system with nothing more than a simple firmware update. From there, we simply set it and forget it – the transition was seamless, and the legacy and new ExaGrids work in harmony.”

“Customers are increasingly looking for ways to get faster, more reliable backups in a cost and space-efficient solution. With this latest system upgrade from ExaGrid, we are able to offer them just that,” said Nancy Middleton, vice president of marketing, Advistor. “As a value-added reseller, we look to partner with vendors that enable us to sell solutions that are high-performance, very reliable, highly scalable, and cost-effective for our customers. ExaGrid’s combination of performance, GRID scalability and price have long accomplished all these objectives for customers—and now, with the smaller, more efficient size and increased performance, customers can get all the benefits of a fast, reliable disk backup with deduplication solution while now consuming even less rack space and cooling costs.”

ExaGrid disk backup systems are designed to meet the needs of companies whose primary storage is between 1TB and 100TBs of data. ExaGrid’s unique approach to disk-based backup delivers unparalleled performance and scalability without requiring costly forklift upgrades as data grows. ExaGrid customers achieve the fastest backup times because data is written directly to disk and data deduplication is performed post-process after the data is stored. In addition, ExaGrid’s GRID scalability enables organizations to store up to a 100TB full backup, plus weeks of retention, resulting in logical storage of petabytes of data. Performance scales with data growth since processing power, memory and bandwidth are added along with storage capacity, and data loads are automatically balanced across all servers.

ExaGrid’s disk backup system with data deduplication supports the industry’s leading backup applications and utilities, including IBM System i platform (AS400 or iSeries), CA ARCserve, CommVault Simpana, HP Data Protector, Linux/Unix dumps, Microsoft SQL dump, Oracle RMAN dumps, Symantec Backup Exec, Symantec NetBackup, Veeam, Vizioncore vRangerPro and VMware Backup.