ExaGrid Systems, Inc. (www.exagrid.com) the leader in scalable and cost-effective disk-based backup solutions with data deduplication, and PHD Virtual Technologies, a pioneer in virtual machine backup and recovery and innovator of virtualization monitoring solutions, today announced a technology alliance that will provide enhanced virtual data protection for joint customers.

With data growing at 30 percent annually, IT departments are faced with multiple backup and recovery challenges, including shorter backup windows, more aggressive recovery time objectives, a need for faster and more reliable disaster recovery, management of growing numbers of virtual servers and the need to do more with tight IT budgets. The combination of ExaGrid and PHD addresses these challenges by offering customers faster backups, unique high performance recovery capabilities, and more efficient disaster recovery via offsite disk-based replication for virtual server environments.

• Faster Backups, More Efficient Data Storage, and Better Disaster Recovery: PHD Virtual Backup offers proven, ultra-fast performance with effortless scalability, built-in ease-of use, and instant flexible recovery. The combination of ExaGrid’s and PHD Virtual Backup’s virtual server data protection solutions allows customers to utilize PHD Virtual Backup in VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer virtual environments on ExaGrid’s disk-based backup system.
  • This combination provides fast backups and efficient data storage as well as replication to an offsite location for disaster recovery.
  • The ExaGrid system leverages PHD Virtual Backup’s built-in backup to disk capabilities and ExaGrid’s zone-level data deduplication for additional data reduction and cost reduction over standard disk solutions. Customers can use PHD Virtual Backup’s TrueDedupe™ built-in source-side deduplication in conjunction with ExaGrid’s disk-based backup system with zone-level deduplication to further reduce the amount of backup data.
  • Customers can also perform replication of backups to offsite storage for disaster recovery purposes, without sacrificing performance of critical backup and recovery functions.
  • The technology alliance with ExaGrid will allow joint customers to leverage PHD’s unique recovery modes, such as Rollback Recovery and PHD Instant Recovery, with the ExaGrid disk backup with deduplication solution for reliable recovery and advanced functionality at the storage level.
• PHD Virtual Backup Instant VM Recovery from an ExaGrid Backup Appliance: ExaGrid and PHD Virtual Backup also offer the ability to instantly recover a virtual machine by running it directly from the ExaGrid appliance in the event of a primary storage outage or other issue that causes the primary storage VM to become unavailable.
  • ExaGrid’s unique landing zone makes this possible by retaining the most recent backup in complete form available for rapid recovery. This means ExaGrid can instantly recover VMs in as fast as minutes. With other disk backup solutions that only store deduplicated data, the data must be “rehydrated” before recovery, resulting in VM recoveries that can take hours.
  • Using PHD Virtual Backup’s Instant VM Recovery, ExaGrid and PHD Virtual Backup customers can run the virtual machine directly from the backup on the ExaGrid appliance. Once the primary storage environment has been brought back to a working state, the VM running on the ExaGrid appliance can then be moved to primary storage for continued operation with zero downtime.

PHD Virtual provides the best value in virtual backup for VMware and Citrix and monitoring solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments. More than 5,000 customers worldwide rely on its products because they are effective, easier to use and more affordable than competitive alternatives. ExaGrid is uniquely suited for virtual machine backups because the ExaGrid system deduplicates the data after it’s written to disk, which means users gain the maximum backup and restore speeds available.

Supporting Quotes:

• Joe Noonan, director of product management for PHD Virtual: “We are very excited to announce a technology alliance with ExaGrid. The synergies between the two products in the areas of redundancy and backup and recovery flexibility provide customers an excellent value and powerful solution for virtual data protection.”
• Marc Crespi, vice president of product management for ExaGrid: “The amount of data in virtual infrastructures is continuing to grow, putting pressure on IT departments to implement faster and more reliable virtual data protection. Partnerships such as this one allow IT departments to confidently expand their virtual environments, keep backup windows permanently short, easily scale the system as data grows with no forklift upgrades, and instant recover VMs when needed to avoid costly downtime.”

About PHD Virtual Technologies

PHD Virtual provides the absolute best value in virtual backup and monitoring for VMware and Citrix platforms. More than 5,000 customers worldwide rely on our products because they are effective, easier to use and far more affordable than competitive alternatives. Delivering the highest performance and most scalable cross platform backup and monitoring solutions on the market and pioneer of Virtual Backup Appliances (VBAs), PHD Virtual Technologies has been transforming data protection for virtual IT environments since 2006. Its PHD Virtual Monitor provides a complete, end-to-end solution for monitoring virtual, physical and application infrastructures in VMware and Citrix environments. For more information, please visit: http://www.phdvirtual.com/

About ExaGrid Systems, Inc.:

ExaGrid offers the only disk-based backup appliance with data deduplication purpose-built for backup that leverages a unique architecture optimized for performance, scalability and price. ExaGrid is the only solution that combines compute with capacity and a unique landing zone to permanently shorten backup windows, eliminate expensive forklift upgrades, achieve the fastest full system restores and tape copies, and rapidly restore files, VMs and objects in minutes. With offices and distribution worldwide, ExaGrid has more than 5,200 systems installed at more than 1,600 customers, and more than 320 published customer success stories.

For more information, contact ExaGrid at 800-868-6985 or visit www.exagrid.com. Visit “ExaGrid’s Eye on Deduplication” blog: http://blog.exagrid.com/.

ExaGrid is a registered trademark of ExaGrid Systems, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.