ExaGrid Posts Record Year in 2014 with Double-Digit Revenue Growth and Cash-Positive Status

WESTBOROUGH, Mass., Jan. 13, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Revolutionary backup storage provider ExaGrid Systems announced today that it had double-digit growth from 2013 to 2014, earning record bookings for its fourth quarter revenue and year. ExaGrid was also both cash and P&L positive for all four quarters in 2014 and for the year. The company consistently ranked 'best at disk-based backup storage with deduplication' by leading experts is positioned for a successful year in 2015.

The only vendor with a unique landing zone and scale-out architecture, ExaGrid offers the industry's fastest backups; the fastest restores, recoveries, and offsite tape copies; VM boots in seconds to minutes; and permanently fixes the backup window length as data grows. ExaGrid also eliminates the forklift upgrades and product obsolescence of the big backup storage vendors.

Turning it up in 2014, ExaGrid highlights include:

• Surpassed 8,000 appliances sold.
• More than doubled the full backup capacity in its GRID architecture, announcing a 448TB full backup in a single scale-out GRID system.
• Became the industry's first tech company to have over 350 published customer success stories, more than all of its competitors combined.
• Attained highest position in the visionary quadrant in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
• Took the majority of the top product positions in the DCIG under $50K and under $100K appliance categories.
• Was the first vendor to integrate with the Veeam Data Mover.
• Increased support to over 25 backup applications and utilities.
• Signed Ingram Micro as a major distributor for North America.
• Expanded sales channels in mainland China.

"ExaGrid achieved a number of great milestones in 2014," said Bill Andrews, CEO of ExaGrid. "From day one, ExaGrid looked at all the other solutions on the market and saw that other vendors had simply added inline deduplication to already existing backup applications or scale-up storage platforms. ExaGrid looked at backup and instead of simply adding deduplication, designed and architected a purpose-built scale-out GRID-based backup storage solution that permanently fixes the problems of data deduplication in backup. ExaGrid's unique approach not only provides the storage advantage of data deduplication, but eliminates the challenges of slow backups, painfully slow restores, recoveries, offsite tape copies and VM boots, and the need to keep replacing solutions every 12 to 18 months. ExaGrid looked at the problem from a backup point of view versus a storage point of view, and it is paying off as customers begin to understand that how data deduplication is implemented has a huge impact on cost and performance. For customers with hundreds of terabytes of data, ExaGrid provides two to three times the backup performance and up to ten times the restore performance at half the price of EMC."

A Year of Technological Innovation

ExaGrid announced the company's most innovative technology in 2014 with the release of EX32000E, was awarded a patent for "Method and Apparatus for Content-Aware and Adaptive Deduplication", and entered into several new partnerships for software integration and increased flexibility for customers' appliance needs.

EX32000E – The new appliance can take in up to a 32TB full backup and with 14 appliances in a scale-out GRID can scale to a 448 terabyte full backup in a single GRID system. A fully-loaded GRID has an ingest rate of over 100TB per hour, the fastest in the industry.

Adaptive Deduplication – This new approach is the best of all worlds. Inline deduplication impedes backup performance and stores only deduplicated data, resulting in slow restores, recoveries, offsite tape copies, and VM boots due to a compute-intensive and lengthy data rehydration process. Post-process deduplication allows for faster backups as well as faster restores and recoveries but waits until all backup jobs are complete to begin replication, resulting in a poorer disaster recovery point. Alternatively, ExaGrid's Adaptive Deduplication technology writes the backups straight to disk for high performance, storing the most recent backup in its full undeduplicated form for fast restores, recoveries, offsite tape copies, and VM boots, and also providing a strong disaster recovery point by performing deduplication in parallel with backups.

ExaGrid-Veeam Accelerated Data Mover – ExaGrid and Veeam developed an integration that allows the Veeam Data Mover to run on the ExaGrid appliance. This greatly improves backup performance and decreases the time to perform a Veeam synthetic full backup by up to 6X.

Ten Mix-and-Match Appliance Models – ExaGrid now offers ten appliance models of various sizes that can be mixed and matched in a single scale-out GRID. An appliance of any size can work with any other appliance in a single GRID. This unique approach eliminates expensive forklift upgrades and product obsolescence.

Praise from the Experts
ExaGrid continues to receive accolades from renowned industry experts such as Gartner, DCIG, ESG, IDC, InfoTech, and Storage Switzerland. Gartner positioned ExaGrid first in the Visionaries quadrant of the first "Magic Quadrant for Deduplication Backup Target Appliances" in 2014. Gartner defines "visionaries" as companies that deliver innovative products with capabilities that are often ahead of the mainstream in the market. 

According to Jerome Wendt, President and Lead Analyst of DCIG, "ExaGrid provides a true solution, with a leading-edge approach that really meets the needs of customers."

Brian Garrett, Vice President of ESG Lab says, "ExaGrid's landing zone and adaptive deduplication give ExaGrid a leg up on the competition."

And Storage Switzerland's Senior Analyst Colm Keegan says of ExaGrid's architecture, "In addition to providing better investment protection, the ability to add nodes 'on the fly' enables data center planners to perform non-disruptive upgrades to the backup environment. This means there is no need to plan for data migrations, which can be a big win for already overworked IT professionals." 

Disclaimer: Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About ExaGrid Systems, Inc.
Organizations come to us because we are the only company that implemented deduplication in a way that fixed all the challenges of backup storage. ExaGrid's unique landing zone and scale-out architecture provides the fastest backup — resulting in the shortest fixed backup window, the fastest local restores, fastest offsite tape copies and instant VM recoveries while permanently fixing the backup window length, all with reduced cost up front and over time. Learn how to take the stress out of backup at www.exagrid.com or connect with us on LinkedIn. Read how ExaGrid customers fixed their backup forever.

ExaGrid is a registered trademark of ExaGrid Systems, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.

¹ Gartner "Magic Quadrant for Deduplication Backup Target Appliances" by Pushan Rinnen, Dave Russell and Jimmie Chang, July 31, 2014.

Media contact:
Sumih Chi
Corporate Ink for ExaGrid Systems
(617) 969-9192
[email protected]

SOURCE ExaGrid Systems