ExaGrid Offers Scalability and Enhanced Security
After a few years of using ExaGrid, The Gray Insurance Company decided to switch to ExaGrid’s SEC models and took advantage of the trade-in deals that ExaGrid offers its current customers. “We needed to increase our storage capacity, so we traded in the appliances we originally bought for larger, encrypted SEC models,” said O’Neil. “The transition to the new appliances was easy, especially considering that we had to copy many terabytes of data from the older appliances to the new ones. Our ExaGrid support engineer helped us through the entire process, and everything went very smoothly.”
The data security capabilities in the ExaGrid product line, including optional enterprise-class Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) technology, provide a high level of security for data at rest and can help reduce IT drive retirement costs in the data center. All data on the disk drive is encrypted automatically without any action required by users. Encryption and authentication keys are never accessible to outside systems where they can be stolen. Unlike software-based encryption methods, SEDs typically have a better throughput rate, particularly during extensive read operations. Data can be encrypted during replication between ExaGrid systems. Encryption occurs on the sending ExaGrid system, is encrypted as it traverses the WAN, and is decrypted at the target ExaGrid system. This eliminates the need for a VPN to perform encryption across
the WAN.
ExaGrid’s appliance models can be mixed and matched into a single scale-out system allowing a full backup of up to 2.7PB with a combined ingest rate of 488TB/hr, in a single system. The appliances automatically join the scale-out system. Each appliance includes the appropriate amount of processor, memory, disk, and bandwidth for the data size. By adding compute with capacity, the backup window remains fixed in length as the data grows. Automatic load balancing across all repositories allows for full utilization of all appliances. Data is deduplicated into an offline repository, and additionally, data is globally deduplicated across all repositories.