News

posted on 01 May 2008 11:02

In a claimed industry-first, ExaGrid says its 5-node setup can store a full 30TB disk-to-disk (D2D) backup plus weeks and months of previous backup data.

What's happened is that ExaGrid has adopted 1TB Seagate SATA drives, and so a single ExaGrid server node, de-duplicating in a post-process, can now ingest a 5TB backup, de-duplicate it and add it to the older de-duped backups on the RAID 6-protected disks. Because the latest backup is held in its raw state, restore is at full disk-speed and not slowed down by re-building de-duped files.

Put six of these 5TB nodes together in a self-configuring grid, presenting itself as a single virtual D2D target,  and you get the 30TB capacity. ExaGrid claims an ingest rate of up to 4TB an hour, meaning it would take 7.5 hours to take in a 30TB backup. However, data specs on its website suggest a 5TBN node can ingest at 540GB/hour. That means six would ingest at 3.24TB/hour and a 30TB backup run would take over nine hours.

ExaGrid nodes are dual Xeon-based and grid capacity and performance both rise as you add up to 12 nodes in a grid.

The new capacity levels apply both to ExaGrid's own EX Series nodes and to the recently announced Dell/EqualLogic PS Series gateway. Product will ship in 3 to 4 months.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}