ExaGrid continues to penetrate the market at a high rate

At The IT Press Tour in New York, ExaGrid positioned itself as a rare constant in a rapidly shifting backup market: a vendor entirely focused on one problem - backup storage - and profitable while doing so. After more than 17 years in the market, the company has built what it describes as the largest independent business dedicated exclusively to backup storage, serving more than 4,800 customers across 80+ countries and reporting continued double-digit growth with no debt and sustained cash positivity.

The core of ExaGrid's proposition is its tiered backup storage architecture, designed to reconcile two historically conflicting goals: fast operational recovery and cost-efficient long-term retention. Unlike inline deduplication systems, which often slow down backups and restores due to rehydration overhead, ExaGrid separates functions into two tiers. A high-performance "Landing Zone" stores recent backups in their native format for fast ingest, instant restores, and rapid VM boots, while a second, non-network-facing repository tier holds deduplicated data for long-term retention at lower cost.

Security and ransomware resilience featured prominently in the discussion. ExaGrid emphasized its use of a tiered air gap, immutability through delayed deletes, and a repository tier that is not directly network-addressable. According to the company, this design ensures that even if ransomware attempts to delete backup data—either through compromised backup software or direct access—the data remains protected and recoverable. Compliance with regulatory frameworks such as GDPR, DORA, and the EU’s NIS2 directive further underpins the platform's enterprise positioning.

Rather than offering an end-to-end backup stack, ExaGrid has aligned itself with the industry’s shift toward best-of-breed architectures. As major backup software vendors increasingly decouple software from hardware, ExaGrid integrates deeply with leading platforms including Veeam, Commvault, Veritas NetBackup, Rubrik, and others. These integrations focus on accelerating ingest, improving deduplication ratios, enabling scale-out architectures, and reducing WAN bandwidth consumption for disaster recovery scenarios.

Scalability is addressed through a true scale-out model. Additional appliances can be added incrementally, maintaining a fixed-length backup window even as data volumes grow into the multi-petabyte range. For distributed enterprises, ExaGrid supports multi-site topologies, hub-and-spoke replication, and cloud-based disaster recovery deployments in AWS or Azure, offering flexibility across on-premises and hybrid environments.

Equally notable was ExaGrid’s emphasis on customer experience. Each customer is assigned a named Level-2 support engineer, installations are typically completed within hours, and all software updates are included without additional licensing fees. With a Net Promoter Score above 80 and a reported customer retention rate exceeding 95 percent, the company argues that operational simplicity and predictable economics are as critical as raw performance.

In a backup market increasingly shaped by cyber risk, regulatory pressure, and escalating data volumes, ExaGrid’s message was clear: while backup software evolves and cloud strategies diversify, resilient, efficient, and recoverable storage remains the foundation. By focusing narrowly on that layer, ExaGrid believes it has carved out a durable role in an industry undergoing structural change.