ExaGrid Makes No Compromises with 'DeltaZone' Backups

Published: October 26, 2010

by Alex Woodie

If Chuck Norris were in charge of your backups, what would they look like? They would most likely be conducted as fast and orderly as possible, because Mr. Norris would want it that way. One could make the argument that ExaGrid, the developer of disk-to-disk backup devices, has found a Norris-like technology in DeltaZone, its new data deduplication feature that doesn't sacrifice scalability for applicability.

OK, so DeltaZone is not the same thing as Delta Force, the action-packed 1986 movie that features the versatile and always-deadly Norris. While the movie follows the actions of a crack team of U.S. Special Forces operatives as they battle Middle Eastern terrorists, the new ExaGrid technology focuses on helping mid-market organizations to better handle their data backup processes within the limitations of time and money. But there are similarities in their no-compromises approach.

According to ExaGrid, the new DeltaZone technology it unveiled last week eliminates the traditional compromise that customers had to make between scalability and supporting a wide variety of applications.

The company says that customers traditionally had two choices. On the one hand, they could go for byte-level deduplication with content awareness, which delivered very good scalability at the cost of increased time and effort to tailor software to support specific environments and applications. On the other hand, customers could go for generic block-level deduplication, which imposed limits in scalability but was easier to integrate and use with a greater number of programs.

"It has often boiled down to a choice between the unbeatable scalability of byte-level dedupe and the generic approach offered by a block-level approach," states ExaGrid vice president of product marketing Marc Crespi in a press release. "With the introduction of DeltaZone, we've eliminated this tradeoff."

Crespi says the new technology will allow ExaGrid to accelerate the pace of development at the company. This is good news for IBM i shops, as ExaGrid unveiled support for IBM i servers just under a month ago.

ExaGrid sells a line of Linux-based backup appliances that feature RAID6-protected SATA drives that connect to servers via NAS. It claims its byte-level, post-processing data dedupe routines can shrink the size of daily backups by 20 to 50 times. Customers can replicate their backup data to other ExaGrid devices through "grid-like" connections, creating a virtual protective web for their data. Even Chuck Norris can appreciate that.

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