Grid protected storage for backup and disaster recovery

ExaGrid Systems, a recently launched company, has developed a system to provide reliable data recovery through grid protected storage.

While the continued growth of online data and evolving regulatory compliance issues have elevated the importance of data recovery and protection, current solutions are woefully inadequate, says ExaGrid.

IT budgets and resources are at a premium and yet current approaches to backup and recover data require many independent products that have to be separately licensed and managed. Additionally, many organisations continue to rely on backup to tape, which is proven to provide low data integrity and can take weeks to recover from a disaster - if at all, explains the company.

Grid computing has developed strong momentum within enterprises providing benefits that include shared computing resources, distributed networked computing, resource independence and scalability and reliability. Leveraging these benefits, ExaGrid has brought the concepts of grid computing to storage and developed an intelligent, distributed, virtualised, disk-based storage solution that, via a Protection Policy Engine, provides:

* End-to-end backup and restore;
* Full and immediate disaster recovery;
* File corruption protection;
* Onsite/offsite vaulting;
* Automatic data migration / hierarchical storage management;
* Archiving and ILM.

ExaGrid's intellectual property - with multiple patents pending - is in the company's innovative software that enables the grid protected storage method. ExaGrid combines standard network file protocols such as NFS, CIFS and FTP with the company's protection policy engine to deliver a full suite of data protection functions.

With highly intelligent, modular components, the grid protected storage approach is:

* Integrated and standards-based: combines storage and protection to greatly reduce the need for multiple backup licenses, servers, tape drives, offsite vaulting services and disaster recovery systems, while also integrating with existing systems/software from companies such as LEGATO, Veritas and Oracle;

* Automated: driven by customer selected policies, performs file versioning, continuous file integrity checking/repair, self healing configuration/notification, automated backup compliance notification and data compression/compaction for space optimisation; and

* Efficient: distributes shared repositories in a grid-based configuration to eliminate islands of storage and any single point of failure, while also providing a global view of repositories/resources.

"The storage industry is trending heavily toward modular systems that are robust enough to replace what has come before, but flexible enough to integrate with it," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst for Enterprise Storage Group. "By focusing on reliable data recovery, ExaGrid is addressing the segment of the storage infrastructure that is most sorely in need of a technology refresh. Their approach holds promise as a way to let customers break free of arcane and unreliable tape backup, while leveraging the existing server and storage infrastructure to provide a more scalable and effective alternative."

www.exagrid.com

•Date: 18th November 2003 •Region: N.America •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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