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IT Press Tour 68: IO River

1 d ago

ExaGrid, the largest independent vendor focused exclusively on backup storage, presented at the 68th IT Press Tour in Boston last week. CEO Bill Andrews reported 18+ years of shipments, 5,200+ customers across 108 countries, and certifications in 132 countries. The company is cash, P&L, and EBITDA positive every quarter with no debt, double-digit growth, and an NPS of +81. Its go-to-market includes 200+ sales staff, resellers and distributors in 70+ countries, and partnerships with 14 Global Systems Integrators such as HCL and Kyndryl. Brand customers span manufacturing (Airbus, Bridgestone, Northrop Grumman), healthcare (Pfizer, Kaiser Permanente, NHS), banking (Barclays, BNP Paribas, Maybank), business services (Accenture, KPMG, FIS), and government (NASA, U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force). Customer retention is 95.6% (98% in top 40% of accounts), with attrition mainly due to acquisitions or cloud migration. ExaGrid’s key differentiator is its Tiered Backup Storage architecture: a disk-cache Landing Zone for fast ingest/restore and a non-network-facing Repository Tier for deduplicated long-term data. The scale-out design (up to 32 appliances) delivers a fixed-length backup window. HDD models (EX36–EX189) scale to 6PB full backups; new all-SSD models (EX90, EX270, EX540) reach 17.3PB at 115.2TB/hour ingest. The vendor competes against primary storage (Dell, HPE, NetApp, etc.) and inline deduplication appliances (Dell Data Domain, HPE StoreOnce), claiming advantages in ingest speed, restore efficiency, and no forklift upgrades. Win rates exceed 70% (74% trailing four quarters) and reach 83% after proof-of-concept. The platform integrates with 25+ backup applications including Veeam (additional 2:1–14:1 deduplication), Commvault, Rubrik, Cohesity, IBM, HYCU, Acronis, and Oracle RMAN, plus nine certified NetBackup integrations. Security features include a tiered air gap via the non-network-facing Repository Tier, AI-Powered Retention Time-Lock with Auto Detect & Guard, immutable objects, delayed-delete policies, drive-level encryption with external key management, RBAC, 2FA, SSH keys, IP whitelisting, and a Security Officer role. Compliance covers DORA, GDPR, NIS 2, with Common Criteria and STIG targeted by end-2026. Disaster recovery supports cross-site replication, hub-and-spoke across 16 sites (50:1 WAN efficiency), tertiary-hop chains, and DR targets in customer data centers, colos, AWS, or Azure. Support includes assigned Level-2 engineers, in-theater local-language coverage, customer-installable hardware (30 min–3 hrs), guaranteed 7-year HDD/5-year SSD life, and 3-year price protection (M&S increases capped at 4% annually). The end-of-June release will add NFS-over-the-wire encryption, MSP share-quota tracking and billing reporting, and expanded Cohesity support.