ExaGrid launches all-flash backup appliances

ExaGrid has launched four all-flash backup appliances with faster ingest speeds and larger capacities complementing its existing disk-based range of purpose-built backup appliances.

The company’s products have a two-tier design with a Landing Zone receiving ingested raw backups, from which the fastest restores can be made, and a non-network-facing and deduplicating repository zone, from which restores are relatively slower as the backups have to be rehydrated from their deduplicated state. ExaGrid’s appliances scale out and deduplication is cluster-wide, not node-specific. Backups are immutable for ransomware recovery, and ExaGrid software includes auto-detect and guard functions to combat malware.

Bill Andrews, ExaGrid president and CEO, said: “With this latest announcement of all solid-state (SSD) appliances, ExaGrid now offers customers the choice of SSD or HDD. With SSD, power and cooling costs are lower, less rack space is required, and the fastest backups and restores are achieved. In addition, customers can use all SSD, or SSD at core locations and HDD at secondary locations, as well as SSD for primary storage and HDD for disaster recovery to save costs. This provides flexibility and choice.”

This table lists the main parameters of ExaGrid’s HDD and SSD appliance range:

The entry-level EX10 and EX20 models are intended for use by larger customers with smaller datacenters worldwide – edge backup appliances as it were.

The four all-flash products use NVMe SSDs and scale out to 32 appliances in a single system, and over 17 PB of full backup capacity. ExaGrid claims this is “the largest single scale-out system storage capacity for any backup storage on the market.”

In terms of capacity, the SSD products partially overlap the disk-based products. A chart positioning the appliances in terms of their weekly full backup capacity shows how they are related graphically:

ExaGrid is launching these all-flash systems at a time when NAND and SSD supplies are in shortage and prices are rising. It says: “Due to three years of software work and the extremely fast performance of SSD, ExaGrid’s new SSD appliance models require a much smaller Landing Zone than on its HDD systems greatly reducing the amount of SSD required, resulting in stronger economics versus SSD primary storage behind a backup application that has either no or low deduplication, such as Pure Storage.” That refers to Pure’s FlashBlade systems.

Backup data reduction is an ExaGrid strength, and it says its software “allows for Veeam, Commvault, Rubrik, and Cohesity deduplication to be enabled or disabled, and further deduplicates the data to the industry’s highest deduplication ratios to save storage and cost. Compression can also remain enabled for Veeam (dedupe-friendly compression), Commvault, Rubrik, and Cohesity.” The company also offers five-year price protection.

Competing backup target system suppliers have already added all-flash products to their line-ups:

• Dell PowerProtect all-flash ready node and DD9910F high-end system with up to 65.4 and 94 TB/hour ingest speeds.
• HPE StoreOnce 7700 with up to 300 TB/hour ingest rate.
• Quantum DXi T10-60, T10-120, T10-240, and T10-480 with up to 113 TB/hour ingest speed.
• Cohesity CX8205, CX8305 and CX8405 which have no public ingest speed numbers.
• Pure Storage’s FlashBlade is not a purpose-built backup appliance but can be a backup target.

ExaGrid’s SSD appliances are shipping now with ExaGrid software version 8. Get a datasheet here.

Bootnote

ExaGrid says that for HDD appliances, the most recent data is stored in a non-deduplicated native backup application format for fast backups and restores. The second tier is a non-network-facing Repository Tier for the storage of long-term retention data in a storage-efficient deduplicated data format. For SSD, the most recent copy does not need to be kept due to the restore performance of SSD.

Also, ExaGrid performs encryption at rest at the drive level in nanoseconds, freeing up the backup application, which is claimed to increase performance by about 20 percent. The data over the wire is encrypted for security but the actual encryption at rest is performed as the data is being written to the storage using self-encrypting drives.