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.