ExaGrid Does It All For Less

ExaGrid Systems has unveiled what the company claims is “the first fully integrated storage and data protection solution.”

The company’s Advanstor data storage and protection solution combines primary network attached storage (NAS) with a fully integrated suite of data protection capabilities, for a “cost-effective self-managing and self-healing solution” for mid-sized businesses and departments of large enterprises.

Advanstor comes with primary storage, backup software and server, archiving software, off-site storage and a disaster recovery site for $62 a gigabyte, about half the cost of buying all that separately, says ExaGrid CEO Mark Kaufman.

But wait, there’s more! Kaufman says Advanstor also provides operational savings that can reduce storage costs by as much as 80 percent in subsequent years. “The savings become quite phenomenal,” he told Enterprise Storage Forum.

Pricing for Advanstor starts at $62,000 for a 1TB solution that includes local and remote site configurations and primary NAS filer storage. With that configuration, customers can implement onsite and offsite backup, site disaster recovery, long-term data preservation and archiving, and automatic data migration across two-tiered storage.

“Advanstor collapses painful and human resource-intensive processes into a single product that intelligently, easily and cost-effectively manages it all,” says Tony Asaro, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “While other next-generation NAS solutions are focused on scalability and performance, ExaGrid has focused on nuts and bolts operations to solve painful IT challenges.”

Early demand for the product has been strong. Kaufman says the company filled all its beta slots in six weeks and had to turn customers away.

The ease and cost savings of Advanstor so far have outweighed any concerns about buying everything from a single vendor, Kaufman says.

“We haven’t had anyone say, ‘I’d rather buy these dozen or so products myself and struggle to integrate them,'” he quips.

Aaron Sawchuk, CTO of customer ColoSpace, calls Advanstor “a compelling approach to reducing costs and inefficiencies associated with backup and disaster recovery while still allowing us to ensure the highest levels of protection and data integrity.”

Advanstor is Windows-based and standardized on commodity hardware. ExaGrid’s intelligent infrastructure software — leveraging grid computing concepts — enables Advanstor to virtualize and optimize storage resources, automatically move and replicate data, and self-heal, based on a centralized policy. The software integrates and manages a distributed set of commodity hardware components, including high-performance NAS storage and repositories of self-managing Serial ATA (SATA)-based “GRIDdisks.”

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