While there are many wars in tech, perhaps none is as intense as that waged in the backup market, and ExaGrid is pulling out a new weapon. No, it’s not a hot new feature or super discounts. It is Patent number 8,589,363.
So how exactly is this is a weapon? It could give the company exclusive use of a restoration technology, or force rivals to pony up with licensing fees.
The patent, “Systems and Methods for Managing Delta Versions,” covers how delta versions (a form of incremental backups) are dealt with. Here you may have multiple delta version that must be brought together during the course of the backup. Delta versions already speed restores because you are only restoring the changed data. Properly merging deltas should speed this further.
“ExaGrid prides itself on having the best disk-based backup technology available, which has been confirmed by several independent analysts and evaluations this year in both the U.S. and U.K.,” said Dave Therrien, CTO and founder of ExaGrid. “Maintaining that level of excellence requires us to continually innovate. This patent win is another step forward for our team toward fulfilling the growing needs of IT professionals in meeting backup demands in the most effective way possible.”
ExaGrid Appliance Story
Many are now turning to hybrid backup or disk-to-disk-to-cloud (D2D2C) where a backup disk on-premises replicates its data out to the cloud for another tier of storage. One of the easiest ways to handle the in-house part is through an appliance, and here ExaGrid has the new EX21000E.
The aim of ExaGrid appliance is to not just provide a predictable backup window, but make it totally fixed so you can depend on it. Further, ExaGrid claims these backup windows won’t lengthen even as the backup volumes grow. This is all due to deduplication, or deltas, which only back up the data that has changed, radically reducing the amount of data that has to cross the network of hit the disk or cloud backup service. If you link 10 ExaGrid appliances you can reach 210 terabytes.
Speed is the critical part of driving down the backup window. Simply put, the faster the backup the shorter the window, and this should carry over to restores. Through deduplication and deltas you are sending over less data to backup. When it comes time to restore, the likewise should be true, where there is less data that needs to be restored. This is because the restore is based on the latest backup, and if you use deduplication there is less data to restore.
Sarah Lawrence College is one organization exploiting the ExaGrid architecture.
“Our data has grown exponentially over the past three years, and ExaGrid has grown with us seamlessly. The best part? There's no ceiling, no limitations. The EX21000E gives us complete confidence in the nightly backup, and makes our data accessible at a moment's notice – exactly as it's supposed to work,” said Sean Jameson, CTO of Sarah Lawrence College.
Cloud Storage
ExaGrid bases much of its business on actual appliances that scale, just as the cloud scales. But the cloud is clearly where a lot of the action is. A report by MarketsandMarkets indicates that the cloud storage market will, on a CAGR basis, grow 40 percent hitting $46.8 billion by 2018. Meanwhile Gartner says they by next year, some one third of medium-sized shops will do disaster recovery in the cloud, up from just 1percent two years ago.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
