Data deduplication has delivered tremendous efficiencies into the data center by enabling organizations to reduce the disk and tape resources required to store backup information. As important, deduplication facilitates bandwidth efficient backup replication as the information required to synch offsite backup systems is greatly reduced through the dedupe process.

Many organizations are interested in leveraging the benefits of data deduplication to streamline backup infrastructure and safely vault business data electronically as part of a more robust DR strategy. A major barrier to entry, however, is cost.

DR Powered by Dedupe

ExaGrid Systems has been shipping cost effective data deduplication appliances to the midmarket to small enterprise for nearly a decade. They recently announced a partnership with cloud service provider ATScloud, to provide cost sensitive customers with a way to replicate data to the ATScloud infrastructure on a per GB basis. This arrangement will now enable ExaGrid clients to further economize on their DR expenditures.

Part of an effective DR strategy involves off-siting backup data on a nightly basis to an alternate data center facility. Tape is a portable medium which is relatively low cost, however, there is the potential for tapes to get mishandled or lost during the off-siting process--threatening loss of data. Furthermore, the time it takes for tape based backup data to reach a “safe harbor” is significantly longer than it takes electronically replicated backup data to safely “land” at a secondary facility. The challenge is doing this affordably and within budget.

DR Powered by the Grid

For these reasons, many businesses have chosen to replace or augment their tape based backup infrastructure with a disk deduplication system which replicates data off-site as part of the backup process. ExaGrid’s modular grid architecture allows users to start out with 1TB of usable, non-deduplicated capacity and scale out to 130TB’s in a single system. Since each individual ExaGrid node contains discrete processing, memory, networking and storage capacity, users can deploy nodes as needed to linearly scale out performance and backup capacity.

Traditional controller-disk shelf designs, also known as “scale up” architectures, require a much larger investment as the buyer must purchase all the CPU and memory resources up front. On the other hand, a “scale out” design, like offered by ExaGrid, can be more efficient as it allows users to deploy only what is physically needed to support existing backup workloads. Moreover, since ExaGrid’s modular design scales out in increments of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, or 13TB to support 130TB’s of native storage capacity, IT buyers can feel secure that they can continue to leverage their investment over time without having to incur a costly forklift upgrade.

DR Powered by the Cloud

ExaGrid’s newly forged partnership with ATScloud, provides the option for ExaGrid clients to leverage ATScloud’ enterprise class data center facility to securely replicate off-site backup data. For businesses lacking a secondary location or for those that have a compliance requirement to send data to a third party facility, the ATScloud DR as a service (DRaaS) is an attractive offering.

ATScloud will enable customers to replicate data from their on premises ExaGrid systems to an ExaGrid system in the ATScloud data center. No up-front hardware investment is required to begin using the service and the customer will only pay for the actual capacity they use. In addition, ATScloud offers advanced DR services like automated cloud based virtual machine (VM) provisioning to facilitate quick application recovery.

Storage Swiss Take

The need for advanced disaster recovery capabilities are no longer “nice to have” or luxury items for SMB or midmarket to small enterprise customers - they are an essential element of any viable business protection plan. Organizations with limited budgets no longer have to resort solely to tape based data protection schemes to insure the protection of their business data assets. Instead, joint DRaaS offerings like those offered through ExaGrid and ATScloud, enable midmarket to small enterprise customers to leverage an infrastructure backup design framework to cost effectively match the specific data protection needs of the customer. This “pay as you grow” type model is well suited to the cost conscious client.

ExaGrid Systems is not a client of Storage Switzerland

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