ExaGrid and ATScloud partner

ExaGrid Systems, Inc has announced a strategic partnership to offer customers cloud-based Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). New and existing ExaGrid customers now have the option to replicate their backup data to ATScloud’s secure cloud infrastructure, reducing or eliminating the need to vault tapes off-site for disaster protection. This announcement marks the first of multiple cloud-based solutions ExaGrid will offer in 2013 that extend the core product’s disk backup with deduplication capabilities to enable DR in the cloud, and ExaGrid is the first and only disk backup with deduplication vendor to offer customers multiple options for cloud-based disaster recovery protection of their backup data.

This new joint Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution, Secure BDRcloud, will enable ExaGrid customers to realise the following benefits:
· Secure storage of data in Tier IV data centers throughout the US
· No up-front capital costs for off-site storage of backup data for DR
· Flexibility to pay for only what is used, avoiding the need to overbuy capacity
· Ability to add or remove capacity quickly as needs dictate
· Advanced options for DR audit and rapid recovery of backup data in the event of a disaster

Gartner, Inc. predicted that by 2014, 30 percent of midsized companies (those with annual revenues or operating budgets of between $150 million and $1 billion) will have adopted cloud-based disaster recovery, which is up from just 1 percent in 2011. In addition, a survey by Forrester Research found that almost three quarters of IT managers whose organisations have already adopted infrastructure as a service said access to improved disaster recovery ranked as either very important or high on the importance scale in their decision, according to an October 2012 article by FCW magazine.

ExaGrid’s disk-based backup with deduplication system avoids the hassles and delays associated with restoring from tapes for on-site recoveries and also is uniquely suited for instant on-site recoveries by keeping the most recent backups intact. Because ExaGrid keeps a full copy of the latest backup in complete form ready to restore, it avoids the time-consuming “rehydration” process required of other disk backup systems that only store deduplicated data. Now, with the addition of the ATScloud partnership, ExaGrid extends its already robust offerings for off-site disaster recovery protection.

“We’re very pleased with the ability to have our backup data offsite and online at the same time. And the pay-as-you-go model made a lot of sense for us, giving us the ability to easily expand as data grows,” said John Rowe, data/information systems engineer for North Central Texas Trauma Regional Advisory Council. “Offsite tape can be a nightmare, and our major goal was having a real-time offsite backup copy for redundancy that we can easily pull back across the WAN in case our primary site went down. ExaGrid and ATS integrated seamlessly with our existing backup infrastructure, and now life is easier and I can be comfortable at night knowing we have a high availability copy of our backup data offsite without the management headaches of tape or having to manage our own offsite DR.”

ATScloud is known for its enterprise-level infrastructure that features technical innovation in a highly secured, protected private cloud environment.