ExaGrid appliances can easily maintain offsite backups through the use of an offsite ExaGrid appliance in conjunction with a primary site ExaGrid appliance. Backing up your data to an ExaGrid appliance at your primary site dramatically reduces the amount of disk space required to store all of that data due to its high-performance data deduplication capability. In a multisite ExaGrid environment, the onsite ExaGrid system is only sending deduplicated data—the backup data that changes at a granular level between each backup—over the wide area network (WAN) to the offsite ExaGrid appliance. The offsite ExaGrid appliance is ready for data restore and fast recovery in the event of a disaster or other primary site outage.
If the replication is one way only, the second site/offsite ExaGrid can be half the capacity of the primary site ExaGrid, greatly reducing overall cost.
Replication between ExaGrid systems across a WAN can be scheduled for the day of the week and multiple times throughout each day. Each scheduled period allows for bandwidth throttling which limits replication to only use the assigned bandwidth. The combination of scheduling flexibility and bandwidth throttling allows for the maximum efficiency of WAN bandwidth used for replication. Replicated data can be encrypted over the WAN using a customer’s VPN or by utilizing the ExaGrid built-in replication encryption.
ExaGrid supports various DR options:
Private Cloud
- Replicating to an ExaGrid at a customer’s second data center (DR site)
- Replicating to an ExaGrid at a third-party hosted data center (DR site)
Hybrid Cloud
- Replicating to a Managed Service Provider (MSP)
Public Cloud
- Replicating to an ExaGrid VM in a public cloud (Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure),
- DR data is stored in the public cloud and billed by the GB per month using OPEX budget
ExaGrid supports three models for private cloud DR sites at a customer’s offsite data center:
- Unidirectional replication to offsite for disaster recovery – In this use case, the entire offsite system can be configured for repository, allowing for a half-size system to be used offsite. ExaGrid is asymmetrical in this use case where all other solutions are symmetrical.
- Cross protection – Data can be backed up at both the offsite and onsite systems and cross replicated such that each site becomes the disaster recovery site for the other.
- Multi-hop – ExaGrid allows for a tertiary copy with two different topologies. – Site A can replicate to site B and then site B can replicate to site C – Site A can replicate to site B and site A can also replicate to site C – Site C can be a physical site or a cloud provider such as Amazon AWS & Azure
- Multiple data center sites – ExaGrid can support up to 16 sites in a single hub and spoke topology with 15 spokes to a hub. Full systems or individual shares can be cross replicated such that data center sites can serve as disaster recovery sites for each other.
