First Distribution is proud to announce that it has been appointed as the Strategic Pan-African Distributor for ExaGrid®. ExaGrid provides backup storage with data deduplication and is designed to run behind a wide variety of third-party backup applications. ExaGrid's approach allows users to save on storage costs, while also delivering 3 times the backup performance, and up to 20 times the restore and VM boot performance, compared to other approaches on the market.

Winston Spagnoletti, Brand Manager for ExaGrid at First Distribution, says "The entire ExaGrid product line will be available to our resellers across Africa via First Distribution. We are very excited about the new partnership with ExaGrid and expect a huge take-up given the tight integration and unique offerings that ExaGrid has with the other vendors in our portfolio that we distribute, such as Veeam Software, Commvault, Veritas, Oracle and more." says Spagnoletti.

Rami Nasser, Vice President of MEA at ExaGrid said, "We are pleased to add First Distribution as a key partner in Africa. ExaGrid supports a wide variety of backup applications, utilities, and database dumps. The solution is simple to use and flexible to allow multiple approaches within the same environment."

ExaGrid writes backups directly to a disk Landing Zone, avoiding inline processing and ensuring the highest possible backup performance, which results in the shortest backup window. Adaptive Deduplication performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups while providing full system resources to the backups for the shortest backup window. Available system cycles are utilised to perform deduplication and offsite replication for an optimal recovery point at the disaster recovery site. Once complete, the onsite data is protected and immediately available in its full undeduplicated form for fast restores, VM Instant Recoveries, and tape copies while the offsite data is ready for disaster recovery.

ExaGrid's product line consists of nine appliance models. Each appliance is sized for a full backup and for long-term retention. Any ExaGrid appliance can be mixed and matched in the same scale-out system with any other size or age appliance, allowing customers to buy what they need as they need it. This pay-as-you-grow model allows up to 32 appliances in a single scale-out system. Additionally, all appliances and systems are managed by a single user interface. Multiple systems can be deployed in a single site, which allows for full backups up to petabytes. A single system configuration allows full backups of up to 2PB with a combined ingest rate of 432TB/hr.

Depending on the environment, the ExaGrid solution offers customers the flexibility to:

• Recover production VMs in under a minute to ensure application uptime
• Retain data on site, off site at a second data center and off site in a third-party managed cloud or public cloud
• Leverage physical cross-replication with up to 16 worldwide major data centers in a group
• Back up directly using SQL dumps or Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN)
• Maintain the ability to have a hybrid approach to data management and backup

For more information, email Winston.Spagnoletti@firstdistribution.com