ExaGrid Publishes Industry’s Most Comprehensive Guide to Data Backup and Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

ExaGrid Publishes Industry’s Most Comprehensive Guide to Data Backup and Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

CEO Bill Andrews authors comprehensive book examining the opportunities and potential pitfalls of using the cloud for data backup and disaster recovery

Westborough, Mass., May 14, 2013 – ExaGrid Systems, Inc. (www.exagrid.com), the leader in scalable and cost-effective disk-based backup solutions with data deduplication, today published a comprehensive book offering IT professionals and CIOs straightforward and pragmatic guidance to help them evaluate various cloud offerings for data backup and disaster recovery. According to this new ExaGrid-published book, while the cloud offers many opportunities for companies to gain operational efficiencies, it is not necessarily a panacea for data backup and disaster recovery in all situations. Organizations need to carefully evaluate their data backup needs and requirements to ensure they can be met by various cloud scenarios.

“ExaGrid currently supports many cloud solutions and strongly believes that the cloud has a place in data backup and recovery. However, IT managers need to separate hype from reality when it comes to data backup, and potential users should look closely at the strengths and weaknesses of each cloud-based scenario,” said ExaGrid CEO Bill Andrews in the book Straight Talk About the Cloud for Data Backup and Disaster Recovery. “This book helps IT leaders navigate through these difficult choices to understand where data backup to the cloud can be effectively used.”

Andrews, a 25-year veteran of high technology, and author of Straight Talk About Disk Backup with Deduplication, said the objective with the new cloud book is to help IT organizations understand the strengths and weaknesses of the cloud for data backup and disaster recovery. The book explains the key considerations for using the private, public, and hybrid cloud so the reader can understand when it makes the best sense to leverage various cloud solutions. The book also offers pros and cons of a variety of private, public, and hybrid scenarios.  In addition, the book includes suggestions and questions to ask vendors and cloud providers to help IT professionals decide where the cloud may logically fit in their environment to meet site-specific data backup and recovery needs.

The book is available for download by visiting the ExaGrid website.

Here is an example of a key take away from the book:

  • Data size and recovery times are key factors in determining the best cloud-based solution. While the public cloud can be used for data backup by organizations with data sizes of under 500GB, for data sizes of 500GB or greater, either a private cloud or hybrid cloud model is the best approach in order to meet recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) for data backup. This conclusion is backed by a November 2012 Gartner report, “Is Cloud Backup Right for Your Servers?” in which Gartner determined that 50GB was the maximum backup or restore data size to fit a “reasonable window” for cloud backup and restores, given bandwidth and Internet/WAN latency.

The book is broken into seven chapters, including cloud model definitions and scenarios, detailed assessments of the public cloud for data backup and disaster recovery scenarios, and pros and cons of seven different disaster recovery scenarios. It also includes a set of questions that IT organizations should ask vendors and cloud providers when evaluating a cloud-based solution.

ExaGrid also recently announced a partnership with ATScloud, the premier hybrid-cloud solution provider, which extends the core ExaGrid product’s disk backup with deduplication capabilities to enable disaster recovery in the cloud. For more information about the Secure BDRcloud solution, visit www.exagrid.com.

About ExaGrid Systems, Inc.: ExaGrid offers the only disk-based backup appliance with data deduplication purpose-built for backup that leverages a unique architecture optimized for performance, scalability and price. ExaGrid is the only solution that combines compute with capacity and a unique landing zone to permanently shorten backup windows, eliminate expensive forklift upgrades, achieve the fastest full system restores and tape copies, and rapidly restore files, VMs and objects in minutes. With offices and distribution worldwide, ExaGrid has more than 5,600 systems installed at more than 1,655 customers, and more than 320 published customer success stories.