ExaGrid Makes New Backup Machines Smaller and Faster

ExaGrid Systems, a rising disk storage backup provider, Dec. 8 announced that it has upgraded its EX1000 through EX5000 line of products by making them faster and less power-hungry.

The company claimed that the new, physically smaller boxes are faster [by anywhere from 25 percent to 160 percent, which is a large range] and that they also lower rackspace, power and cooling requirements by as much as 54 percent.

If true, those are notable claims. These features represent nirvana for storage engineers; they all want their products to be able to do this. And the green people — Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program, the Green Grid, and others — love this.

“By reducing the size of ExaGrid’s form factor and speeding the ability to ingest data, we now deliver even faster, more efficient backups to our customers,” said Marc Crespi, vice president of product management for ExaGrid. “These hardware upgrades allow customers to better manage green IT initiatives by requiring less space and lower power and cooling costs.

“The sleeker design frees up rack space, while the new appliances still fit within our highly scalable GRID architecture. This gives our customers a ‘mix and match’ capability to use newer appliances and avoid technology obsolescence and forklift upgrades experienced with competitive disk backup appliances.”

The enhancements to the EX1000 — EX5000s include hardware improvements to processors and I/O sub-systems as well as enhanced memory and connectivity. ExaGrid’s 1TB through 4TB appliances are now available in a 2U size instead of the previous 3U size, and the new products offer the most space and energy-efficient disk-based backup with deduplication solution for customers in their class for the mid-market.

ExaGrid has some 3,000 systems installed in 750 data centers around the world.