ExaGrid System of Choice for Arch
“We looked at all the big players including Data Domain, Quantum, and ExaGrid,” said Smith. “It was a long process because we wanted to make sure that we were making the right choice, and we’ve been pleased with our decision. Not only was ExaGrid’s post-sales support great, but the pre-sales support was as well. We’re very picky and we were impressed with how thorough the pre-sales team was; they were very willing to go the extra mile to satisfy our questions. We’ve had no regrets.”
Smith said that the main factors that contributed to Arch’s decision to install ExaGrid over the competition were value for the price, scalability, and support. “Scalability in particular is very important to us. We have an ExaGrid in each of two Bermudian data centers, and we’re currently cross-replicating with the intention of adding another system shortly for disaster recovery. In addition, we have a system in Dublin and one in Zurich that also cross replicate. We’ve already expanded our ExaGrid system. All I had to do was add another appliance; we didn’t need to do a forklift upgrade,” he said. An added plus was the fact that ExaGrid works seamlessly with their existing backup application, Veritas Backup Exec.
The ExaGrid system can easily scale to accommodate data growth. ExaGrid’s computing software makes the system highly scalable, and when plugged into a switch, appliances of any size or age can be mixed and matched in a single system with capacities of up to a 2.7PB full backup plus retention and an ingest rate of up to 488TB per hour. Once virtualized, they appear as a single system to the backup server, and load balancing of all data across servers is automatic