ExaGrid Focuses Dedupe Push on Midmarket

Company:

Headquarters: Westborough, Mass.

Technology Sector: Storage

Key Product: ExaGrid Disk-backup with Deduplication System

Year Founded: 2002

Number of Channel Partners: 200 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Midmarket-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: ExaGrid's deduplication appliance provides an alternative to technology from Data Domain with a grid-based architecture that scales performance as capacity is increased.

The Lowdown: Solution providers looking for an alternative to deduplication technology leader Data Domain may want to give ExaGrid a glance.

ExaGrid targets midmarket customers with a storage appliance that provides deduplicatation for their backup data.

The appliance accepts file-based data sent across a network for backup purposes, dedupes that data once it has been received, and then keeps it in both the original format and in a compressed format.

When stored in its original format, specific files can be quickly recovered locally if needed without having to un-deduplicate them (a.k.a. "rehydrate" them), said President and CEO Bill Andrews.

However, multiple versions of files can be kept on the appliance by deduping those copies to save space, he said.

The data can also be replicated to a second site, Andrews said. Then, as files are created or modified, they are copied to the second site to ensure an up-to-date copy of the backup is available if needed, he said.

Because ExaGrid's appliances are based on a grid architecture, each storage node comes with its own processing technology. Then, as additional nodes are added in order to accommodate expanding capacity, the performance of the overall ExaGrid infrastructure also grows.

With other similar systems, capacity is grown with the addition of storage nodes, but they typically do not add new processors, meaning that performance can lag as capacity grows, Andrews said.

ExaGrid offers good margins to solution providers as well as a healthy deal registration discount, Andrews said. "We have not and will not take a registered deal direct," he said.

Andrews also said to keep an eye on ExaGrid going forward for another reason: The company plans to go public in the second half of 2011.