10 December 2015

ExaGrid has partnered with Zerto for the delivery of complementary backup solutions that aim to greatly improve data centre performance and cost efficiency. 

Zerto specialises in enterprise-class business continuity (BC) and disaster recover (DR) solutions as well as continuous data replications. It will now use ExaGrid’s disk-based backup storage and data deduplication architecture. 

The platform enables the most recent Zerto backup of Tier 1 VMs in a ‘Virtual Protection Group’ to be stored in an ExaGrid Landing Zone in its native format for fast restores and boot-ups. Long-term copies of these offsite backups are then retained in the ExaGrid repository as deduplicated data. 

The companies say this results in a smaller storage footprint that allows extended retention policies to be met at greatly reduced storage costs. 

Zerto president Paul Zeiter says: “The combination of continuous data replication and deduplication technologies will give end-users the flexibility to better manage their data and protect it over the long term.”

ExaGrid’s says its “unique” Landing Zone provides the ability to very quickly restore mission-critical VMs and VM data because the data are immediately available in their full, undeduplicated form. It says this means the data don’t need to be “rehydrated or reassembled” prior to being restored. 

As well as storing Zerto backups, ExaGrid can sit behind the nightly backup application at the primary site and provide protection for all backups, both virtual and physical. 

ExaGrid says its Landing Zone and scale-out GRID architecture allow for faster backups, resulting in a shorter backup window, restores and VM boot speeds that are as much as ten times faster than competitive solutions. They also enable a fixed-length backup window as data grows.