ExaGrid launched its latest purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) – EX32000E with built-in dedupe. The EX32000E is actually 14 appliance mashed together in a single scale-out GRID, allowing for a 448TB full backup in a single system, a 52 percent increase in total capacity. Exagrid claims the EX32000E is now one of the largest full-backup target systems on the market, with 882TB of usable storage and over 1PB of raw storage.

On paper, the EX32000E has an ingest rate of 5.6TB per hour upwards to 7.5TB per hour in a single system depending on CIFS, NFS, Veeam Data Mover, or OST. With OST, the EX32000E has an ingest rate of 105TB per hour with 14 appliances in a GRID system.

ExaGrid claims that this 105TB per hour ingest rate is three times that of EMC Data Domain with Boost. However, DSA was unable to verify this figure for lack of information on the EMC Data Domain website. ExaGrid offers a rather one-sided comparison on their website.

ExaGrid claims that this feature is partly attributable to the product’s unique landing zone where the most recent backups are kept in their full undeduplicated form for restore, recovery and VM boot performance of up to ten times faster than inline deduplication appliances such as EMC Data Domain, which only stores deduplicated data. Of course, by storing data in deduplicated form, the theory is you are able to reduce the amount of storage capacity.

The EX32000E appliance, which houses 72TB of raw and 63TB of usable data, can take in a 32TB full backup undeduplicated in a front-end landing zone for fast restores and recoveries and maintain a long-term historical version in a deduplicated data repository.

The ExaGrid scale-out approach brings compute with capacity – adding processor, memory and bandwidth as well as disk – allowing the backup window to stay fixed in length even as data grows. This approach is unique to ExaGrid and makes it the only disk-based backup system that maintains a fixed backup window.