ESG Technical Review: ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage Cost Savings Benefits for Commvault Environments

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. announced that a newly published ESG technical review, ExaGrid with Commvault: Maximum Deduplication Savings with Easy Management authored by Kerry Dolan, senior IT, validation analyst and Craig Ledo, IT, validation analyst, documents ESG’s validation of ExaGrid testing that demonstrated both the capacity savings and ease of use available from a combined ExaGrid and Commvault Systems, Inc. backup solution.

The data de-dupe from Commvault can remain turned on and ExaGrid furthers de-dupe by a factor of 3:1.

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From ESG report:
“It is well known that both ExaGrid and Commvault offer backup solutions that are easy to use and can help you to store data more efficiently with de-dupe. What may be less well known is that a combined ExaGrid and Commvault solution can achieve even greater de-dupe: up to 20:1 in many cases. A 20x reduction in backup storage costs can be a significant boost to any budget.“

ESG validated that:

• “Combined ExaGrid/Commvault solution reduced a 123TB backup data set that included 15 days of file data, VMware VMs, and SQL database backups down to 8.66TB, a 14:1 reduction, in a realistic yet intentionally conservative test environment.”

• “Deploying and managing the combined solution was simple, intuitive, and fast.”

ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage requires integration between the backup software and the backup storage. Together, the 2 companies provide a cost-effective backup solution that scales to meet the needs of demanding enterprise environments. ExaGrid improves the storage economics of Commvault environments by working with Commvault de-dupe on to provide up to 20:1 reduction in storage consumption – a 3X storage savings over using Commvault de-dupe alone. This combination lowers the cost of onsite and offsite backup storage.

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Commvault de-duped data can be sent to the firm’s appliances for further de-dupe. The company takes the average 5:1 Commvault de-dupe ratio up to 15:1 which reduces the storage footprint by 300%. This reduces the cost of the backup storage while allowing no change to the current Commvault configuration since the Commvault de-dupe can remain on. In this example, The firm can replicate the 15:1 de-duped data to second site for offsite long-term retention and DR. The additional de-dupe saves WAN bandwidth in addition to saving storage at both sites.

“ExaGrid continues to innovate to optimize integration with the backup applications we support, providing our customers with unique benefits for the backup applications that they use. We have been able to further deduplicate Commvault’s de-duped data for some time now to maximize storage savings, and this new report highlights how well this actually works, all without requiring current Commvault users to make changes to their configuration,” said Bill Andrews, president and CEO, ExaGrid. “We hope that current Commvault users and those who are planning to use Commvault will take a look at this report and consider the storage savings that ExaGrid can bring to their backup environment. Separately, ExaGrid can greatly improve Commvault backup and restore performance if Commvault de-dupe is turned off. In this case, ExaGrid provides the same storage savings but with greatly improved backup and restore performance. ExaGrid gives Commvault customers the option to keep Commvault de-dupe turned on, or for improved performance, turned off.“