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It's an exciting day for ExaGrid, our customers and partners, and for backup and recovery professionals! 

In follow-up of our news last week about being the only vendor to achieve certification with Symantec Backup Exec 2010 OST for both basic and optimized duplication, today we're pleased to announce that Storage magazine-SearchStorage.com has named ExaGrid's EX10000E disk backup with data deduplication system "Product of the Year" in the Backup and Disaster Recovery Hardware category.  Winners were determined by ratings on six criteria: innovation, performance, easy integration into existing environments, ease-of-use and manageability, robust functionality, and high value to end-users.  The awards were judged by the Storage magazine-SearchStorage.com editorial staff, along with a team of end users, industry experts, analysts, and consultants.

Customers tell us all the time about their frustrations with tape backup due to its low reliability, slow performance and long backup times, and management headaches.  Backups and restores fail, backups running beyond the backup window are shut-off while data is left unprotected, and many  IT professionals spend a good part of their week just managing their tape backups.

Replacing tape with disk is clearly a great way to solve these problems. Disk backup with data deduplication offers the fastest and most reliable backups and restores, and as data grows ExaGrid scales without performance degradation or forklift upgrades. But, even with these advantages over tape, in a tough IT spending environment lots of people have seen disk backup as too expensive.  As we shared in our previous post, we're actually the first vendor to deliver disk backup with data deduplication at a cost that approaches the price of tape, and we're pleased that the judging team at Storage magazine-SearchStorage.com recognized ExaGrid for breaking open the economics of disk backup.  Here are a few excerpts from the award recognition:

 "The company [ExaGrid] responded to another industry-wide theme in 2009: relentless data growth, regardless of company size, coupled with flat or declining budgets. With the release of the EX10000E, consisting of up to 10 10TB server nodes for a total capacity of 100TB, new customers can store more data in less space than with previous models."

"In keeping with a theme of frugality in a down economy, the EX10000E consumes 50% less power than previous generations."

"As one of our judges put it, ‘ExaGrid remains one of the few vendors thinking about how a system grows with the customer. Kudos on taking it to the next level.'"

You can read the full write-up here:

Thank you to our customers and partners for your key role in this award, and special appreciation as well to the judging panel for this recognition.  Our customers keep telling us that ExaGrid's combination of performance, scalability and price is a winning solution for them in today's environment of tight IT spending, and we are excited to keep driving this high value for customers, partners, and the backup and storage marketplace.

On the heels of a record-breaking quarter, we're pleased to announce today we've taken a next step in our ongoing drive to deliver all of the benefits of disk backup with data deduplication at a cost comparable to tape. ExaGrid's new lower pricing model is ideal for mid-market and small enterprise companies who struggle with the challenges of tape backup and want to transition to disk backup with deduplication but haven't yet made the move because of cost concerns.

You're no doubt well aware of the problems of tape-long backup times, failed backups, failed restores, tape gets mislabeled or labels fall off, tape is lost or damaged, and the list goes on.  ExaGrid delivers all the performance, reliability and security benefits of backing up to disk, at a cost that approaches the price of legacy tape libraries and tapes.

What's this mean if you're considering making a move from tape to disk?  You can read about the benefits here, including elimination of failed backups and restores, faster disaster recovery, better security, and increased IT productivity because staff spends less time on backup. It also means shorter backup windows, as dramatized by Marc Crespi, our VP of Product Management, and yours truly in this short video clip. 

We hope you find the video entertaining, but more importantly, we hope that these reduced prices remove a final obstacle for you in switching to a more reliable backup system that also gives you a few hours back every week to spend on other projects and priorities.

With the start of a new year, it's always helpful to look back at the recent past as well as some of the industry predictions for 2010 in the data deduplication space.  W. Curtis Preston, Exec. Editor at SearchDataBackup, Independent Backup Expert and webmaster at BackupCentral.com, has written a piece with 2010 predictions we thought you might find to be of interest. 

We appreciate Curtis' comments about our product differentiation and market success.  Indeed, ExaGrid's GRID scalability has served our customers and partners well in 2009 and will continue to bring significant value to our customers 2010.  Since ExaGrid's unique architecture enables customers to easily scale their disk backup with data deduplication systems as data grows without performance degradation or forklift upgrades, the total cost of ownership of ExaGrid is unmatched in the industry. 

One of the great things about ExaGrid is that our customers are delighted with the operational gains they see from using our disk backup with data deduplication appliance.  Of more than 1,700 systems across nearly 500 customers, more than 130 customers have shared their success stories, and a recent one is BankWest.  If you are facing issues with data growth, long backup times, and IT time spent managing backups, perhaps there are some worthwhile lessons in their experience.

As the bank's data grew, their previous tape library could not keep up.  Their team would start a full backup on Friday and it would be completed the following Monday or Tuesday often delaying the differentials scheduled Monday - Thursday.  Since implementing ExaGrid, BankWest has seen dramatic results. The company's backup window has been cut by a factor of 90%--from three to four days to now only about six to eight hours. In addition, BankWest's IT department saves about four hours a week that used to be spent on administering and managing tape.

According to BankWest's IT manager, "Being able to write to disk to ExaGrid made the managing of our backups 10 times more efficient. We were spending several hours a week just holding the tape library's hand and monitoring tapes and switching them back and forth. Now, we are only spending a matter of minutes just to verify that everything is running smoothly."

For those who need to justify moving from tape to disk, this is how BankWest described their situation. The bank looked into upgrading its tape drives with new hardware and compared that with moving to a disk-based system. "After evaluating all of our options and comparing tape and disk, it was clear that a disk was the best solution for us.  Continuing with tape was going to cost us too much money and it wouldn't provide us with the scalability that we had to have."

 "In the end, it was easy to justify the cost of moving to ExaGrid. When we considered the cost of upgrading our tape libraries and the ongoing cost associated with maintaining and managing tapes, it was a no brainer financially."

 We hope this story is helpful for you.  Best wishes for an enjoyable holiday season!

GreenBank is a Tennessee chartered commercial bank with more than 60 branch locations, and after having grown quickly by acquiring several other banks, found that their tape library could no longer keep up. Weekend full backups were taking three days to complete and incremental backups were taking over 24 hours. With banks open seven days a week, it was critical for their backups to be completed within their backup windows every night, but the tape backups took too long and often failed before completion. Restores were also time-consuming and difficult to perform using tape. Jason O'Dell, IT manager for GreenBank, described their old backup application, tapes and tape drives as "a nightmare to get everything properly backed up."

GreenBank has one ExaGrid system located in its Greeneville datacenter, and a second system to replicate data to its disaster recovery site. Incremental backup times have been cut in half and are now completed in less than 12 hours, and full backups have been cut from three days to just 24 hours. In addition, GreenBank is now cost-effectively retaining nearly three months of data, and their helpdesk easily performs restores for end users, cutting time-consuming tape inventory delays and restores. The cost savings on tape alone is nearly $24,000.

Jason also commented, "With ExaGrid our backups are now completed consistently every night and our IT staff spends far less time managing and administering backup processes and tapes. The ability to reliably backup all the data received from many servers at many locations has allowed the team to work on more strategic projects."  To read the full story, click here.

The InfoWorld 100 award comes on the heels of two other awards that we did not have the chance to blog. Last month, ExaGrid's disk backup with data deduplication system was named winner of the Tech Awards Circle, taking Bronze in the Best Midrange Hardware category.

And in mid-September, ExaGrid's customer, Gardner Trucking, was named winner of Info Security Products Guide's 2009 Best Deployment Scenario Award in Data Recovery. Gardner chose ExaGrid's disk-based backup system with data deduplication based on its scalability and unique approach to data deduplication, and beyond those factors, the ExaGrid system also cost approximately 25 percent of the cost of competitive solutions. Coincidentally, two days after they installed the ExaGrid system and switched from tape, a database crashed. With the ExaGrid backup system in place, it took only 25 minutes to restore the data, but most importantly, Gardner avoided the two days of system downtime and an estimated loss of $200,000 in business and productivity they would have incurred if they had to restore their database from tape. To read more about this case study, visit http://www.infosecurityproductsguide.com/casestudies/.

I'm writing this post from the SNW Conference in Phoenix, and would like to share some perspectives on the product news we are announcing today.   The announcement is primarily about scalability, and helping customers maintain short backup windows as data volumes grow. 

There are two parts to the product news.

First, our new EX10000E 10TB disk backup server allows customers to store a 10TB full backup plus long-term retention in a compact 4U rack-mount server.  Secondly, in addition to the 10TB server, we announced an upgrade to our GRID software that expands the maximum number of servers in a GRID configuration to ten. This more than triples the capacity of prior generation ExaGrid systems. So, with the new 10TB server and our enhanced GRID software, customers can now store a 100TB full backup, plus weeks or months of retention, in a singly managed cost-effective GRID-based disk-backup system with data deduplication.

As a backdrop to the news, customers face an ongoing challenge of backup times growing beyond the allowable backup window as data volumes grow.  Tape libraries-with their known scalability, reliability, and maintenance issues-are typically not a viable option.  And in many cases, disk backup with dedupe products are architected with single controllers, requiring a costly "forklift" upgrade of the controller as data grows.  Our new EX10000E solves this problem for customers with large, growing amounts of data by enabling them to achieve their backup window goals with seamless modular scalability as data grows. Here are a few highlights:

Highly Scalable Virtualized GRID Architecture: Performance scales with data growth since complete dedupe servers (including CPU, memory bandwidth, and storage capacity) are added in a GRID, instead of just more disk capacity. 

Best Price/Performance for Shortest Backup Window and Fastest Data Restoration: We help customers achieve shortest backup windows by writing the backup direct to disk at full disk speed, with deduplication done post-process.  And customers get the fastest restore by leveraging our capability to keep the most recent backup in its whole form.

Singly-Managed GRID System: This is one of the capabilities customers say is the most impressive of our GRID architecture.  Customers benefit from a virtualized pool of storage that balances capacity and shares data deduplication across systems automatically, and installations are managed via a single centralized web UI.

Cost-Effective, Flexible Solution with No "Forklift" Upgrades: Users of the ExaGrid system who are not sure of their future data growth can buy just what they need up-front.  Any combination of EX Series 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 10TB systems can be mixed and matched in multiple configurations, and customers avoid over-buying capacity since modular systems can be easily combined in a virtualized GRID for larger capacities as needed.  

Green, Energy-Efficient Operation: The EX10000E's packs a lot of performance (1.8TB/hour) in a compact 4U server and consumes 50% less power on average than prior generations. Customers can store a lot more backup data in the same space and see big savings in power, cooling and space requirements versus standard disk.

We're the first and only vendor to provide this level of performance and capacity in a NAS-based disk backup system with deduplication starting at a list price of $85,900 for the EX10000E 10TB server.  Our customers are excited about the news.  If you are at the SNW Conference, please stop by our booth and we'd be glad to share more details.

We are conducting an industry survey this week to hear your insights and experiences around data backup, deduplication, and virtualization, and we'd like to invite readers of this blog to participate.  The online survey takes less than 10 minutes to complete, and your individual answers will remain completely anonymous.

Go directly to the survey now via this link:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=bvv_2f8sXTtkg11wvSAq4S8A_3d_3d

This short survey asks for your perspectives on topics including tape vs disk backup and recovery, data deduplication, and virtualization.  We've been impressed by the overwhelming number of responses since the survey opened on Monday, and look forward to hearing your voice as well. 

The survey closes 6pm EDT this Friday, August 28, and we will post a report of the results to the blog shortly after the responses are compiled. 

Thank you in advance for your participation.

The article published about data deduplication on Forbes.com, "A Better Way to Store Data" is a good opportunity for me to write this first blog post as VP of Marketing at ExaGrid. 

The issues with tape backup that Bill mentions in the article ("Backups fail. Restores fail. It's probably the dirtiest job left in IT, but there has been no way to solve it") and the significant value of disk backup with deduplication brings are among many things that make ExaGrid a great company in an exciting space.

I invite you to consider the analogy made in the article between old VCRs with VHS tapes and DVDs.  How many of those reading this post still use VHS tapes for viewing movies at home?  And how many of you moved to DVDs or DVRs, even before your old VCR died?  Tape libraries, like the old VHS tapes, represent "old technology that's well past its limits."  Just like DVD players have reached a price/performance level that for most people has made them a no-brainer versus VCRs, we're now at the inflection point where disk with deduplication costs about the same as tape.  Given the advantages of faster backups and restores, greater reliability, ease-of-use, scalability, and cost parity, it should be a simple decision to move to disk.  Do you agree?

I'll look forward to sharing thoughts and perspectives on the backup marketplace in the near future.  Please feel free to comment below or drop me an email bhobbib (at) exagrid (dot) com if there are topics you would like to see us discuss.

One of the things that continues to trouble me about how vendors use their blogs is that they often degrade into nothing more than competitive mud-slinging.  Don't get me wrong, vendor blogs are perfectly good vehicles to put factual information about your product out there and to compare and contrast it to other approaches.  However, it seems that the factual product content continues to decline while the rumor, innuendo, and FUD continues to rise.  I cite Rich Colbert's recent blog entry over at Data Domain's Dedupe Matters as a prime example.  Given ExaGrid's message to the market of having a next generation architecture for disk-based backup with data deduplication, I do not think it is a stretch to assume he was referring to ExaGrid in his tantrum.

While I plan to briefly respond to some of his points, I will quickly get back to information regarding the ExaGrid product as I think that is the source of the clear frustration Rich is feeling about the challenge by a vendor he will not name.

Rich's first premise is that if you were not first to market, you are "late" or "disorganized" and can never hope to rival the first market mover's technology or adoption.  Thankfully, there are many examples of why this assertion is inaccurate.  Just ask some of the other late and disorganized companies such as DELL, Microsoft, or even Sun Microsystems, none of who were the first entrants into the markets they ultimately dominated.  And while not all of their current fortunes are bright, there is no question they entered markets with already coronated leaders and figured out what they missed and exploited it to great success.  And there have been first entrants that have withered as times change.  Anyone remember Novell?

On another point, contrary to Rich's implication that only Data Domain is established in this market, ExaGrid now has close to 400 customers in its portfolio with over 2,000 installed systems across a wide variety of verticals. We continue to have record quarter after record quarter, even in this tough climate. 

And, our customers love us.  In fact, more than 110 of our customers demonstrated their satisfaction by having their deduplication success with ExaGrid documented with their names and titles. This is more customer success stories than all other vendors in our space combined, including Data Domain.

While Rich's current employer can cite more customers than ExaGrid due to being the first entrant, there certainly is no question that ExaGrid's technology has been validated by the market and is responsible for our rapid growth and greater than 70% competitive win rate.

But with all of that said, IT buyers need information about products not random musings by vendors.   We as vendors need to simply put our products forward so that customers can decide which one better meets their requirements.  On the product front, ExaGrid brings the following unique things to this market that were not present in first generation approaches:

• Scalability - our GRID based architecture maintains a customer's backup window and restore performance as their data grows and avoids fork lift upgrades when you reach a system's capacity.
• Backup/Restore performance - our post-process architecture provides for faster backups (maximum of 5 TB/hour) and optimized restores and tape copies of most recent data by eliminating deduplication overhead.
• Contrary to assertions by exclusively in-line vendors, it is meaningless to compare restore rates for deduplicated data.  If 95% of the time restores will come from the most recent backup which is in non-deduplicated form with ExaGrid , then what is the point?
• Suggesting that it is important to compare restores from deduplicated data is like saying an airline with a 5% on-time arrival record is equal to one with a 95% on-time record because the better airline is also late 5% of the time.
• Unified management - ExaGrid's management interface places an entire multi-site installation in a single web interface for all configuration and management reducing management time and complexity.
• Backup job aware reporting - ExaGrid uniquely can provide deduplication ratios and replication status by backup job so that users can really maximize their space savings and understand exactly which backup jobs are ready for restore at a DR location.

I wonder if it is the above differences that made Rich afraid to "help our organic search results" by mentioning us by name?  If a company is as invincible as he made Data Domain sound, why be afraid your prospective customers will find a later to market company making wild claims such as a markedly better approach?