 |
ExaGrid Systems, Inc. is a tiered backup storage company headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts.
| |
ExaGrid Systems, Inc. is a tiered backup storage company headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts.
The company was founded in 2002 by Dave Therrien to solve the challenge of integrated primary storage with data backup. The company was funded by venture backed funding from Sigma Partners and Highland Capital Partners.
The name ExaGrid was derived from two words: “Exa” from exabytes of data and, “Grid,” an approach to grid computing scale-out storage which ExaGrid was based on.
In 2005, Bill Andrews joined the company as president and CEO. Bill currently remains in the position as of 2022. Under Bill's leadership the company pivoted to backup storage with a tiered backup storage architecture.
In 2006, ExaGrid shipped its first backup storage appliances.
Over the years from 2006 to current, ExaGrid has added many features/functions such as zone level deduplication, adaptive deduplication, global deduplication, scale to 2.7PB full backups, 32 appliances in a single scale-out system, the ability to deduplicate Commvault data, the ability to support Veritas NetBackup Accelerator, support of the Veeam Data Mover and Veeam SOBR (scale-out backup repository) and many other features and functions.
ExaGrid appliances are used by companies to store their backup data. The appliances are used in IT data centers in commercial accounts, public education, local government, federal government and universities.
In 2007 ExaGrid raised capital from Lehman Brothers (now Tenaya Capital)
From 2007 to current, ExaGrid has opened offices in over 20 countries including: Argentina/Chile, Australia, Benelux, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Iberia, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Nordics, Poland, Russia, Saudi, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States.
In 2009 ExaGrid raised capital from Investor Growth Capital (Investor AB)
In 2009, ExaGrid's largest competitor, Data Domain was acquired by EMC, a leader storage and later EMC was acquired by Dell. Today ExaGrid's largest competitor is Dell.
In 2014, industry analyst firm Gartner placed ExaGrid in the visionary quadrant in their Magic Quadrant for deduplication backup target appliances.
In 2016, the Metasploit project for performing security pentation added a module to gain root level access to ExaGrid appliances. [1] [2]
In 2017, ExaGrid expanded its customer base to include MSP (Managed Service Providers) and IT OutSourcers.
In January 2019, ExaGrid moved its corporate headquarters from Westborough, MA, to The Campus at Marlborough in Marlborough, MA
In June 2019, a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures bulletin CVE-2019-12310 is released indicating a critical (9.8 out of 10 score on the CVSS v3.0 scale) security issue with ExaGrid firmware version 4.8.1.1044.P50 allowing remote attackers to view verbose log information without having to provide a password. [3] [4] [5]
In 2020, the company won 7 industry awards: Network Computing Awards (Company of the Year and Hardware Product of the Year), Storage Awards “The Stories XVII” (Enterprise Backup Hardware Vendor of the Year and Storage Performance Optimization Company of the Year), SDC Awards (Storage Company of the Year, Storage Hardware Innovation of the Year and Vendor Channel Program of the Year). [6] [7] [8]
In April 2021, according to industry press the company reportedly paid 2.6 million dollars to Conti ransomware attackers. Attackers claimed to get "personal data of clients and employees, commercial contracts, NDA forms, financial data, tax returns and source code." [9]
In 2021, the company won 9 industry awards: Network Computing Awards (Bench Tested Product of the Year, Storage Product of the Year and The Return on Investment award), Storage Awards “The Storries XVIII” (Enterprise Backup Hardware Vendor of the Year and Immutable Storage Company of the Year), SDC Awards (Vendor Channel Program of the Year, Storage Hardware Innovation of the Year and Storage Company of the Year).
In 2021, ExaGrid further expanded its target customers to include the data centers of Fortune 500 organizations.
Quantum Corporation is a data storage, management, and protection company that provides technology to store, manage, archive, and protect video and unstructured data throughout the data life cycle. Their products are used by enterprises, media and entertainment companies, government agencies, big data companies, and life science organizations. Quantum is headquartered in San Jose, California and has offices around the world, supporting customers globally in addition to working with a network of distributors, VARs, DMRs, OEMs and other suppliers.
Dell EMC is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and Round Rock, Texas, and is a subsidiary of Dell Technologies. Dell EMC sells data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud computing and other products and services that enable organizations to store, manage, protect, and analyze data. Dell EMC's target markets include large companies and small- and medium-sized businesses across various vertical markets.
NetApp, Inc. is an American data infrastructure company that provides unified data storage, integrated data services, and cloud operations (CloudOps) solutions to enterprise customers. The company is based in Cork City, Ireland. It has ranked in the Fortune 500 from 2012 to 2021. Founded in 1992 with an initial public offering in 1995, NetApp offers cloud data services for management of applications and data both online and physically.
Permabit Technology Corporation was a private supplier of Data Reduction solutions to the Computer Data Storage industry.
Unitrends Inc., a Kaseya company, is an American company specializing in backup and business continuity.
A virtual tape library (VTL) is a data storage virtualization technology used typically for backup and recovery purposes. A VTL presents a storage component as tape libraries or tape drives for use with existing backup software.
Dell EMC Isilon is a scale out network-attached storage platform offered by Dell EMC for high-volume storage, backup and archiving of unstructured data. It provides a cluster-based storage array based on industry standard hardware, and is scalable to 50 petabytes in a single filesystem using its FreeBSD-derived OneFS file system.
In computing, the term data warehouse appliance (DWA) was coined by Foster Hinshaw for a computer architecture for data warehouses (DW) specifically marketed for big data analysis and discovery that is simple to use and has a high performance for the workload. A DWA includes an integrated set of servers, storage, operating systems, and databases.
Ocarina Networks was a technology company selling a hardware/software solution designed to reduce data footprints with file-aware storage optimization. A subsidiary of Dell, their flagship product, the Ocarina Appliance/Reader, released in April 2008, uses patented data compression techniques incorporating such methods as record linkage and context-based lossless data compression. The product includes the hardware-appliance-based compressor, the Ocarina Optimizer and a real-time decompressor, the software-based Ocarina Reader.
StorSimple was a privately held company based in Santa Clara, California, marketing cloud storage. It was funded by venture capital from Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Ignition Partners, and Mayfield Fund for a total of $31.5 million.
Exalogic is a computer appliance made by Oracle Corporation, commercially available since 2010. It is a cluster of x86-64-servers running Oracle Linux or Solaris preinstalled.
NetVault is a set of data protection software developed and supported by Quest Software. NetVault Backup is a backup and recovery software product. It can be used to protect data and software applications in physical and virtual environments from one central management interface. It supports many servers, application platforms, and protocols such as UNIX, Linux, Microsoft Windows, VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, NDMP, Oracle ACSLS, IBM DAS/ACI, Microsoft Exchange Server, DB2, and Teradata.
Arkeia Software is an American computer software company. It produces network backup software for 200 platforms including Windows, Macintosh, Linux, AIX, BSD and HP-UX, and also a backup appliance, integrating its software with disk storage and network connectivity. In January 2013, Western Digital Corporation announced it had acquired Arkeia Software. In May 2015, a community representative for WDC posted on their forum, indicating that the Arkeia Network Backup product line was being phased out.
Pure Storage, Inc. is an American publicly traded technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States. It develops all-flash data storage hardware and software products. Pure Storage was founded in 2009 and developed its products in stealth mode until 2011. Afterwards, the company grew in revenues by about 50% per quarter and raised more than $470 million in venture capital funding, before going public in 2015. Initially, Pure Storage developed the software for storage controllers and used generic flash storage hardware. Pure Storage finished developing its own proprietary flash storage hardware in 2015.
Disk-based backup refers to technology that allows one to back up large amounts of data to a disk storage unit. It is often supplemented by tape drives for data archival or replication to another facility for disaster recovery. Backup-to-disk is a popular in enterprise use for both technical and business reasons. Storage devices have gotten faster access time and higher storage capacity. There are different forms of disks used for back up, standard mechanical disks and solid state disks.
Veeam Software is a privately held US-based information technology company owned by Insight Partners. It develops backup, disaster recovery and modern data protection software for virtual, cloud-native, SaaS, Kubernetes and physical workloads. Veeam Software was co-founded by two Russian entrepreneurs, Ratmir Timashev and Andrei Baronov. While Veeam's start was built on protecting data across virtualized workloads, it has significantly expanded to protect data across a wide variety of platforms from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Microsoft 365, Kubernetes, etc. Veeam's current CEO, Anand Eswaran, has been pushing Veeam's strategy to accelerate share in the enterprise with adding several layers to Veeam's partnerships. Veeam took over the #1 market share in the data protection category in the second half of 2022. The company headquarters is in Kirkland, Washington, United States.
NEC HYDRAstor is a disk-based grid storage system with data deduplication for backups and archiving, developed by NEC Corporation. A HYDRAstor storage system can be composed of multiple nodes, starting from one up to 100+ nodes. Each node contains standard hardware including disk drives, CPU, memory and network interfaces and is integrated with the HYDRAstor software into a single storage pool. HYDRAstor software incorporates multiple features of distributed storage systems: content-addressable storage, global data deduplication, variable block size, Rabin fingerprinting, erasure codes, data encryption and load balancing.
Dell Technologies PowerFlex, is a commercial software-defined storage product from Dell Technologies that creates a server-based storage area network (SAN) from local server storage using x86 servers. It converts this direct-attached storage into shared block storage that runs over an IP-based network.
Veeam Backup & Replication is a proprietary backup app developed by Veeam for virtual environments built on VMware vSphere, Nutanix AHV, and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors. The software provides backup, restore and replication functionality for virtual machines, physical servers and workstations as well as cloud-based workload.
Dell EMC Data Domain was Dell EMC’s data deduplication storage system. Development began with the founding of Data Domain, and continued since that company’s acquisition by EMC Corporation.