StorageCraft and ExaGrid Join Forces for Best-of-Breed Backup Software and Storage

StorageCraft and ExaGrid Join Forces for Best-of-Breed Backup Software and Storage

Partnership creates a unique end-to-end solution that delivers performance advantage for backups and restores

Westborough, Mass., November 18, 2015 – ExaGrid®, the leading provider of scale-out disk-based backup storage with data deduplication, and StorageCraft® Technology Corp., the leader in backup and disaster recovery software, have announced a partnership that provides a unique end-to-end solution for data backup.

Both products are next generation and together they create a unique performance advantage for both backups and restores. The combination of StorageCraft’s snapshot technology and ExaGrid’s landing zone and scale-out backup storage allows backups to occur quickly. This is due to StorageCraft’s backup approach and ExaGrid writing backups direct to disk and then performing adaptive data deduplication. In addition, ExaGrid keeps the most recent backup in its full, undeduplicated form in a landing zone, enabling StorageCraft to perform fast restores. Long-term retention is kept in a deduplicated form for low-cost storage.

“The combination of StorageCraft and ExaGrid is perfect for EMC NetWorker, Commvault Simpana, Veritas NetBackup, Veritas Backup Exec, and IBM TSM customers who want to move away from expensive, slow, and complex backup environments to a backup environment that is low cost, easy to manage, and fast for both backups and restores,” said Bill Andrews, CEO of ExaGrid.

Most first and second generation backup and disaster recovery software products struggle to balance short recovery time objectives with the benefits of deduplication. StorageCraft’s unique snapshot architecture requires minimal system resources to capture system recovery points, which are then acted upon by ExaGrid to deliver superior storage efficiencies. With the combined solution, short recovery times, quick restores, and excellent storage utilization are all achieved with minimal impact on production systems.

“The ExaGrid and StorageCraft solutions work together to enhance each solution’s strengths, resulting in an extremely fast, efficient, and simple backup process coupled with quick restores and excellent storage utilization that scales,” said Scott Barnes, StorageCraft’s chief technology officer. “This partnership produces backup and recovery solution options that IT professionals will be excited about.”

The first generation deduplication appliances and solutions simply added data deduplication inline on the way to disk in scale-up storage (front-end controller with disk shelves). This creates three challenges. The first is that backups are slow due to performing data deduplication, which is a compute-intensive process, during the backup window. Second, restores, offsite tape copies, and VM boots are slow as all data is stored in a deduplicated form and takes time to rehydrate. Lastly, as data grows, only storage is added and as a result of not adding compute, the backup window gets longer.

ExaGrid not only deduplicates data to save on storage footprint and cost but solves all three of the deduplication compute challenges. First, backups are written direct to disk to avoid the high overhead of deduplication during the backup window. Second, the most recent backups are stored in a landing zone in their full, undeduplicated form since 95% of restores, offsite tape copies, and VM boots come from the most recent backups. With the landing zone approach, backups are as fast as disk with no rehydration time. Lastly, as data grows, ExaGrid adds full appliances with processor, memory, bandwidth, and disk in a scale-out GRID architecture so the backup window stays fixed length.

“StorageCraft and ExaGrid make the perfect partners to provide customers with a low-cost, easy-to-use, cost-effective next generation backup solution,” said Andrews.

About StorageCraft
The StorageCraft family of companies, founded in 2003, provides best-in-class backup, disaster recovery, system migration and data protection solutions for servers, desktops and laptops. StorageCraft delivers software products that reduce downtime, improve security and stability for systems and data, and lower the total cost of ownership. For more information, visit www.storagecraft.com.

About ExaGrid
Organizations come to ExaGrid because we are the only company that implemented deduplication in a way that fixed all the challenges of backup storage. ExaGrid’s unique landing zone and scale-out architecture provides the fastest backup—resulting in the shortest fixed backup window, the fastest local restores, fastest offsite tape copies and instant VM recoveries while permanently fixing the backup window length, all with reduced cost up front and over time. Learn how to take the stress out of backup at www.exagrid.com or connect with us on LinkedIn. Read how ExaGrid customers fixed their backup forever.

ExaGrid is a registered trademark of ExaGrid Systems, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.