Press Release
ExaGrid Systems Delivers the First Fully Integrated Storage
and Data Protection Solution
Advanstor is Self-Protecting Storage That Delivers Automated Data Storage
Management, Backup, Restores, and Rapid Disaster Recovery;
Represents 50 Percent the Cost of Traditional Approaches
Westborough, Mass., November 15, 2004 - ExaGrid Systems, innovators in Self-Protecting Storage, today announced Advanstor™, the industry's most comprehensive data storage and protection solution that combines primary Network Attached Storage (NAS) with a fully integrated suite of data protection capabilities. Advanstor - available immediately - provides a cost effective self-managing and self-healing solution for mid-sized businesses and departments of large enterprises.
Driven by a centralized policy engine, Advanstor attacks the cost and complexity of current approaches to storage and data protection. Windows-based and standardized on commodity hardware, ExaGrid's patent-pending software and fully integrated two tiered, disk-based solution can drive the costs associated with traditional protection approaches down by as much as 50 percent in the first year, and as much as 80 percent in subsequent years.
"There is a real business challenge for companies to fully protect data and ensure disaster recovery," said Mark Kaufman, president and CEO of ExaGrid Systems. "Firms that range from legal services to energy, manufacturing, financial services and pharmaceutical are facing ever increasing business and regulatory pressures to protect the constant growth of data. And protection must be accomplished without the staff or budgets to integrate and manage multiple storage software and hardware components. Advanstor is the only integrated storage and protection system that meets the demands and provides easy, fast and ultra-reliable data restores with plug-and-play simplicity."
ColoSpace, a leading provider of colocation, managed hosting and disaster recovery services in the Northeast, is in trials with Advanstor, to support ColoSpace's own storage requirements, as well as provide a cost-effective foundation for disaster recovery services to its customers. "We provide our customers with carrier-grade facilities to store and protect their data and equipment, ensuring 100 percent uptime for their hosted applications and Internet presence," said Aaron Sawchuk, CTO of ColoSpace. "We evaluate new approaches and solutions to storage backup and recovery very carefully. We feel that Advanstor is a compelling approach to reducing costs - and inefficiencies - associated with backup and disaster recovery, while still allowing us to ensure the highest levels of protection and data integrity."
Growing businesses continue to face the challenge of managing exponential data growth, which is expanding in excess of 100 percent a year. Compounding the problem is the arrival of regulatory issues and the ongoing requirement for rapid data access and recovery to ensure business uptime. Current solutions for data management and protection comprise a diverse set of new and old technologies that have to be separately licensed and managed. Standard backup and disaster recovery approaches provide poor protection and excessive recovery times with frequent failures - in some cases as high as 40 percent - for restoring all data after a disaster.
Additionally, the current process of managing multiple different software and hardware products requires extensive manual integration, leading to islands of data that never are backed up. Many backup processes result in drastic over-replication of static data, with cost and staffing remaining major deterrents to implementing disaster recovery programs.
"The ExaGrid Advanstor solution combines primary NAS storage, D2D backup and disaster recovery/avoidance, eliminating the need for backup software and tape libraries," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. "Advanstor makes the management of data as it moves through its lifecycle of primary, nearline, archival, and off-site a seamless part of its operations. Advanstor collapses painful and human resource-intensive processes into a single product that intelligently, easily and cost effectively manages it all. While other next-generation NAS solutions are focused on scalability and performance, ExaGrid has focused on nuts and bolts operations to solve painful IT challenges."
Addressing backup and disaster recovery issues, ExaGrid's intelligent infrastructure software - leveraging grid computing concepts - enables Advanstor to virtualize and optimize storage resources, automatically move/replicate data, and self heal - based on a centralized, easy-to-define policy. ExaGrid's software tightly integrates and manages a distributed set of commodity hardware components including high-performance NAS storage and repositories of self-managing Serial ATA (SATA)-based GRIDdisks. The value of the Advanstor architecture lies in its ability to ensure:
Storage and Protection - primary NAS with automated data migration; continuous on-site/off-site backup and distributed site protection in a two-tiered solution
Data availability - fast and ultra-reliable restores, fast site disaster recovery and automated file integrity assurance
Self management - single policy management, no tape handling or off-site vaulting, plug-and-play simplicity
About ExaGrid Systems
ExaGrid Systems, Inc. is a leading provider of Intelligent Disk-based Data Protection Systems. ExaGrid® works in conjunction with existing backup applications to provide cost effective, disk-based data protection. With ExaGrid, organizations can leverage technology investments while supplementing or replacing their tape libraries with a disk-based solution.
Extremely cost effective, ExaGrid provides data reduction for each version through byte-level delta technology, which requires far less disk storage than traditional data protection solutions. Storing deltas for each version instead of storing full file copies reduces the amount of disk space needed to at least 20 to 1, and can be much higher depending upon retention periods. ExaGrid delivers a turn-key, plug-and-play solution at 50% to 80% less than the cost of SATA or ATA disk.
With ExaGrid, organizations can replace onsite tape backups with a disk-based solution and still retain or supplement their existing offsite tape strategy.
The company is located in Westborough, Massachusetts, and is privately held with funding from top-tier investors Highland Capital Partners and Sigma Partners. ExaGrid Systems is located in Westborough, Massachusetts. For more information, call 800-868-6985 or visit us online at www.exagrid.com.
2000 West Park Drive, Suite 110
Westborough, MA 01581
508-898-2872
For additional information contact:
Wayne St. Amand
ExaGrid Systems, Inc.
(508) 898-2872 ext. 286
wstamand@exagrid.com
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