ExaGrid Detailed Product Description

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Support for Heterogeneous Backup Applications and Utilities

Customer environments are made up of many backup approaches, backup applications, and utilities and

different disk-based backup approaches support these in different ways. Customers may have any number

of backups occurring in their environment, including traditional backup applications such as Veeam, Veritas

NetBackup, Commvault, IBM Spectrum Protect (TSM), Dell EMC NetWorker, HYCU, Zerto, and many others as

well as direct-to-disk SQL dumps, Oracle RMAN direct backups, and specific UNIX utilities such as UNIX TAR.

ExaGrid supports over 25 backup applications and utilities.

ExaGrid is able to support backup data from multiple sources, including a variety of backup applications and

database dump utilities. Performing deduplication in the backup software limits the ability to have all data

from all sources stored and deduplicated in a single target device. Unless 100% of your backup data passes

through that particular backup application, a purpose-built disk-based backup appliance such as ExaGrid’s is

the best choice to meet the requirements of your entire environment.

In contrast, backup application software solutions that have incorporated deduplication by definition only

support their own backup application, with its own backup server software and its own backup client agents.

These solutions are not able to support backup data from other backup applications or utilities. For example,

if you have a physical environment, for backup applications that employ data deduplication but want to use

a separate utility for VMware (ex: Veeam) and also do direct database dumps, only the data running through

the physical system’s backup application will be deduplicated. Also, deduplication in backup software ranges

from 2:1 to 10:1 and therefore uses a lot more disk and bandwidth as retention grows versus target-side

deduplication appliances that employ far more aggressive deduplication algorithms, since with appliances,

resources are dedicated to the task. Dedicated appliances achieve ratios on average of 20:1, using one-quarter

to one-third the disk and bandwidth.

ExaGrid allows for Veeam and Commvault to leave deduplication turned on and ExaGrid will further

deduplicate the data for increase storage efficiency.