ExaGrid EX Series Reviews

We used ExaGrid EX Series as a landing zone for Veeam software. Initially they did not have immutable storage, but when they released that feature, we implemented it. We used it with Veeam software and Oracle Storage. We performed many restores with both Veeam and Semantic. It was commonly used with Oracle software.

ExaGrid EX Series and Veeam was easy to set up, and it worked seamlessly. It was very simple to use. We rarely needed to touch the ExaGrid boxes, except for upgrades.

With the systems engineer from ExaGrid, and with our common knowledge of backup software, it was very easy to use.

The performance was good, the interface was good, and the GUI was good.

When ExaGrid introduced the air gapped feature, it was almost complete. Almost every hardware vendor has an air gapped feature, but they were significantly ahead of other vendors. The air gapped and immutable storage are very nice features. The price compared to other competitors was good with better features. It is not a cheap product, but compared to the features, it is a good competitor.

Everything can always be better, so I would give it a nine.

I am not using it at my current position, but I used it for approximately 4 years.

It is awesome. We scaled from approximately 100 terabytes to 4 petabytes. It was very easy to add more nodes. While 4 petabytes in the global world is not much, for a Swedish company, 4 petabytes is substantial.

The customer service is awesome. We received all the help we needed. They even called us to suggest system upgrades when there were known errors with Veeam VMware. They scheduled time and performed the upgrades for us.

Positive

While I do not know all other customer environments, they should certainly do a proof of concept to verify it works. I would estimate that in 95% of cases, it will work excellently. That is what we did. We tried products from Dell EMC through proof of concepts, and they did not deliver.

I was a customer. My overall rating for ExaGrid EX Series is 9 out of 10.

My company uses the solution to clean our backup storage.

The most valuable features of the solution are deduplication and landing zone.

The product's documentation can be made more precise. The good thing is you can access the appliance when you go to the online documentation, which is always up-to-date. There needs to be a proper explanation of the enhanced consoles in the documentation.

I have been using ExaGrid EX Series for three years. My company is a user and customer of the solution. I use the solution's latest version.

It is a stable solution.

It is a very scalable solution that allows you to add any product of ExaGrid to it.

Apart from the backup administrator, more than 1,000 users operate on the solution in our company. We need one administrator for the solution in our company.

My company may plan to increase the usage of the solution in the coming years.

The solution's technical support is great. You get a dedicated engineer for technical support when you buy an ExaGrid product. The response from ExaGrid's technical support is almost instant. I rate the technical support a nine and a half out of ten.

Positive

My company used to have NAS storage from Synology and QNAP. My company switched from Synology and QNAP to ExaGrid EX Series because you must build a very big cluster of NAS systems if you don't have a deduplication appliance.

In the past, I had also worked with solutions like Dell EMC Data Domain and HPE StoreOnce, which were not as quick and easy to handle as ExaGrid.

The solution's implementation process was very easy.

The solution can be deployed within a day.

A single person can do the deployment.

Initially, a person might consider the product expensive, but if you look at the larger picture, all deduplication appliances are generally expensive.

My company had to pay 1,60,000 EUR for the system we use, and the payment was made just once for the system and five years of full support.

Speed-wise, ExaGrid is much faster than the other solutions in the market.

When you choose between or from several different manufacturers, you need to understand a little bit about how the product exactly works and why its speed can be so high while being able to compare it to other solutions, allowing you to know of the backup window if you ever need it. You have to understand how it works and the product's preferences, even though the price may be slightly higher.

Learning about the solution is not at all a problem, but when you open a console, you see so many things, and in the beginning you don't understand it all. Later on, it becomes more usable when you start understanding it. In general, ExaGrid provides you with a lot more information than any other system in the market.

It is difficult to say what is additionally required in the solution because, presently, it has a lot of things like immutability, anti-hacking, and retention. The solution does put efforts towards improvement.

The product's interface provides you with a proper overview of the deduplication rate and the status of how many storage systems you are left with through a visual screen, which is more than enough. When you go deeper, you can access all the enhanced consoles.

The product can easily be integrated with third-party products because ExaGrid has all its best practice documents for integrating it with many other products.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.

Some of our typical use cases involve the current installation of Veeam software and its expanding capabilities. Particularly, the focus is on duplication and backup protection. Introducing Veeam has brought about new backup and protected storage solutions. 

The tool has improved backup and recovery times. One of the key features contributing to this improvement is the landing zone and deduplication retention zone. When data is in the landing zone, the process is fast, ensuring smooth backup and recovery operations at high speeds. However, the process becomes slower for long-term backups moved to the retention zone due to fragmentation. So, if the data is older than a few days, the speed may be limited, especially for non-deduplicated data in the landing zone.

The tool reduces storage footprint. However, clients are now storing data for longer durations with increasing requirements to retain backups for longer periods, particularly as a defense against ransomware attacks. As a result, the retention zone with duplicated data is experiencing more demand, leading to space constraints. This necessitates using higher-end, more expensive models to address the issue.

I was asking about the mutual appliance, which would provide the same features as the integrated client without the hardware. This would allow it to be used in the public cloud, which I heard might be available soon. However, the private cloud is not reliable.

I have been working with the product for five to six years. 

ExaGrid EX Series is very stable; I rate it as nine out of ten. 

The tool's scalability is very good, and no issues were encountered. One of the best aspects is combining newer and older models. These models support the latest software versions. However, support for older models can be expensive, so investing in new ones with updated support and potentially better discounts is often more cost-effective. My company has thousands of users for the ExaGrid EX Series. 

Tech support might be slow at times when solving problems.

Positive

The ease of initial setup depends on the complexity of the design. For simple designs, it's straightforward. However, in highly secure environments with many firewalls, setting up replication can be challenging due to the requirement for numerous ports.

The product doesn't require a lot of maintenance. Once it's set up, it runs smoothly without much intervention. Occasionally, issues like unfinished backups or broken processes might require manual deletion with support assistance. However, such instances are rare. 

I rate ExaGrid EX Series' pricing eight to nine out of ten. 

The tool's integration with backup software, such as Veeam, is natural. It includes a module that replaces the need for a proxy server, which helps with deployment and speeds up backups. Additionally, it has good integration with Commvault software. However, testing with IBM Spectrum Protect wasn't as successful, but the issue lies more with IBM Spectrum Protect's handling of disk space rather than the ExaGrid EX Series itself.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. It is good. 

We use ExaGrid EX Series for backing up our Veeam Backup, vSphere, or VMware environments.

The solution easily integrates with the backup targets, such as Veeam.

The solution could improve by switching to a flash-type solution rather than the spinning drives that they currently use. However, we have not had any failure with the spinning drives. The flash-type drives are more up-to-date and are something that is in their roadmap.

I have been using this solution for approximately three years.

The solution is stable. It is one of the most stable appliances that we own. We have never had any issues with it, such as bad hard drives. It just runs well.

ExaGrid EX Series is scalable. You can connect another ExaGrid Appliance to it to provide more disk space. I have been told it is simple to upgrade, you do not need to dispose of the current hardware, you can add to it. There is de-duplication and other features that use space but we have not needed to add disk space and we are only at one quarter used so far. 

We had the Barracuda Backup Appliance previously called Barracuda Backup, and it was not flexible, we were running out of space. Some companies do proper specification and then others try to bring their price point down by getting you in. Then in a year or two down the road, you start running out of space, which is what happened to us with the Barracuda solution.

One of the most valuable aspects of the ExaGrid EX Series is the support. They dedicate an engineer to us that we deal with. We do not have to call to create a support ticket. We only need to contact our support engineer which is very convenient. Usually, with other companies you contact support and you hope you receive someone half-decent. Their support is excellent and it is easy to set up too.

We have previously used other backup solutions, such as Barracuda Backup and Unitrends.

The Barracuda combines two products, the Backup Appliance and the software for backing up. It is similar to having Veeam and ExaGrid together and it is the same with Unitrends. We had Unitrends for approximately five years. it was quite a few years ago and they have improved their product since then. We had many failures and after the fourth hard drive failure with Unitrends is why we first started to look for another solution. If we did not have the failures we most like would still be with them.

The support services guide you through the whole installation process, which was very helpful.

We did the implementation with the help of their support.

The previous solutions I have used both included the Backup Software and the Appliance making it hard to compare to this solution. However, overall the solution is reasonably priced for the features you receive. ExaGrid EX Series is priced better than HP, Dell, and possibly Commvault which I have compared in the past.

I have evaluated Commvault, HP, and Dell solutions.

I would advise others that this solution is hands-off and is easy to implement.

I rate ExaGrid EX Series a ten out of ten.

Our typical use case is for bigger customers with a demand for capacity, speed of backup, and especially speed of recovery. Mostly we were successful with the Veeam software, but because Veeam is not strong in deduplication, and ExaGrid has a built-in acceleration, this was the one of the drivers for why we went them.

In terms of its most valuable features, the first thing is that it is a solid and quite simple solution, which is a good combination. The customers like the simplicity and its scale-out capacity. They like the support pricing, and even the extension capacity pricing, a fixed price, which the executive is offering in the Czech market.

This is a good step to start a discussion.

In terms of how the product could be improved, that depends. The one place where we are sometimes losing the opportunity with ExaGrid is that a few customers still require fiber channel connectivity, which is not always possible. But technically I don't think this is something that ExaGrid should add.

A second thing is the protection which is a nice feature, but practically speaking, the Dell EMC data domain is quite strong in Czech market, and they're offering the worm protection, but the worm protection itself is not that important. The important thing is that they are one protection. 

They are proven by a third party that it's compliant with some regulations. This is something we already discussed with ExaGrid, that they should take this step, or should somehow prove they are officially better protection for the customers. They should obtain some kind of certification.

I have been using ExaGrid EX Series for around three to four years.

They had multiple versions and I think the last big step was version five. It includes  protection against ransomware.

In terms of stability, I can say it's quite stable. I'm in development and we are doing upgrades of the software. The customer appreciates that there is a development of the product so that they have new features every half a year. This somehow goes against the stability.

But I think that they appreciate that it is a product which is growing their capabilities.

I cannot say we have issues with the stability.

I would say that the tech support is quite okay. Our company is based on highly qualified technicians, so we're trying to solve as much as possible internally. When we call the support, I appreciate that we have a dedicated person for the customer so we can communicate directly and very openly, without the unnecessary starting steps of obtaining information and this kind of thing, like with other big vendor call centers.

So, from this point of view, we like their support.

For our customers, 90% of virtualization is on their VMware. The other ones are not that successful. I cannot say this in general, but for  our customers, it's mostly VMware, so it's a focus for us. But from the backup point of view, the more important issues are not the virtualization platform, but the virtualization software they are using and Veeam is very common, and they are very aggressive in pricing, so it's quite a popular solution.

The initial setup depends. For one of the projects, it was quite straightforward. On another we were dealing with that did not have the optimal requirements structure to open so many ports to replicate between the sites, one of the customers finally changed the design offered and they chose to use the replication of the Veeam and not the replication of the ExaGrid, because of the requirements to set up so many ports for all the firewalls on all the locations to enable replication between two ExaGrid appliances.

This is something which I would appreciate if it could be changed, although it is not very typical for our customers to have to focus on this.

The focus of the customer is on the protection and number of open firewall ports. It's not that important for many customers, so customers are willing to open the port and they have less strict processes for why and how to do this, but the bigger the customers is the bigger the issue is regarding the number of open ports in setting up the firewalls.

The issue itself is based on the fact that there is a landing area and a duplication area in the ExaGrid appliances. Typically this is one-to-one, and this means that only half of the capacity is presented as the duplication area and in case you are using a replication, the replication itself is between the duplicated area as in two ExaGrid appliances, which means that you can have more of the duplicated space effectively used.

So if there is an issue with the firewall guys, then if you choose to use the replication of the software and not the appliance itself, the landing zone must be bigger, and the duplication area smaller, which goes against the price efficiency of the solution.

We are buying into it as appliances. We got hardware and software bundled with the one price, so we didn't know how much it is for the hardware and how much for the software.

We are actively offering this to our customers, and I believe that this it is a good solution for the Czech market.

On a scale of one to ten, it depends what kind of customer and what kind of environment. If it is a smaller solution like VMware and Veeam, I can say ten, with no doubt. If is a very big customer, then I can expect problems with opening the firewall ports, and if they are not using the Veeam, then I would say maybe eight or nine. Let's say nine.

We use the solution for backup and recovery. It is integrated within to backup and recover virtual machines.

One of the main features is the landing zone, it is a particular space where the information is not duplicated. When you speak about the recovery, it is faster than the information that has been duplicated. This feature is good. 

Product support could be improved. It is next day support when it comes to parts.

I have been using the solution for 1 year.

The equipment is pretty solid. We have had an issue once with one of the discs, we reported it and they sent us the part. We only had to change it and that was it, very easy.

When speaking about a scale-out, you want to have better equipment. You cannot just add a disc to the current equipment. You have to buy another one and put it together, in parallel. If you think of this as scalability, it could be a little more expensive. However, it also adds more CPU power and that can be an advantage. Regarding the cost of adding a second box, ExaGrid says that they have pretty good discounts, they try to compensate for it. 

The support is not that fast to deal with our concerns. It is next day support, they could improve on the speed.

The setup was really easy. The equipment is really easy to configure and install.

The current agreement has 21 terabytes of free space and it cost approximately $35,000.

Those evaluating this product should understand you cannot just increase the equipment size as easy as adding discs, it is really important to have good initial sizing for the equipment. If you need more space, you will have to buy another box.

I rate ExaGrid EX Series an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is for onsite backup. 

ExaGrid has improved my organization in the way that we get reliable backups with very little administration. We are able to do more backups per day due to increased storage as a result of data deduplication and compression.

The most valuable feature is the ease of use and data deduplication. It's extremely easy to use and does a very good job of data deduplication and compression.

I would like for them to develop direct cloud integration with a third-party cloud. Direct integration with AWS and other cloud providers. 

It's extremely stable. 

It's very scalable. 

Only I use this solution. It backs up all of our data, company-wide.

Their support is top notch. I've only had one setup issue, and it was resolved extremely quickly and I've had no support cases or calls since setup.

The initial setup was extremely straightforward. They have installation services which made it very straightforward. We only required one person for the deployment and maintenance. 

The deployment took two days. Over the course of two days, in total, it took four hours of actual work time.

We had an assisted setup by ExaGrid. The professional services were very helpful. 

Our reseller was Nordisk Systems. We had a good experience with them. The implementation is done by ExaGrid, the manufacturer and the vendor itself is the deployment service.

In comparison to other solutions, it's affordable. They're all too expensive. This was less expensive than other solutions that I was looking at.

We also evaluated Data Domain by Dell EMC. 

I would advise someone considering this solution to review and to consider it as an option. If you're comparing it specifically to Data Domain, it's a great solution.

I would rate it a nine out of ten because of the ease of the implementation, technical support, and ease of operation.