The Escalating Challenge of Ransomware-Resilient Backup Infrastructure
Enterprise backup storage has reached a critical inflection point. Organizations face an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape where traditional backup solutions become primary attack vectors. Ransomware operators systematically target backup repositories, understanding that compromising recovery infrastructure eliminates the victim’s last line of defense. Meanwhile, data volumes continue their exponential growth trajectory, forcing IT leaders to balance performance, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership—often requiring uncomfortable compromises.
This convergence of security imperatives and performance demands has exposed fundamental limitations in conventional backup architecture. Inline deduplication appliances sacrifice backup speed for storage efficiency. Primary storage arrays offer raw performance but lack purpose-built ransomware defenses and deduplication capabilities. The market has needed a solution that refuses to compromise on any dimension of the backup storage equation.
Introducing ExaGrid’s All-Flash Architecture With Unique Tiered Design
ExaGrid has announced an all-flash SSD backup storage solution that fundamentally reimagines tiered backup architecture. The company now ships four appliance models—EX90-SSD, EX135-SSD, EX270-SSD, and EX540-SSD—capable of scaling to over 17 petabytes of full backup capacity within a single system of up to 32 appliances. All models ship with ExaGrid software version 8.
The architecture centers on a distinctive two-tier design: a front-end Landing Zone for active backup operations and a non-network-facing Repository Tier that stores all backup retention using advanced data deduplication. This Repository Tier functions as a tiered air gap, invisible and inaccessible to network-based threat actors. According to ExaGrid President and CEO Bill Andrews, the company invested three years in software development to optimize SSD performance, enabling a significantly smaller Landing Zone than their HDD systems while maintaining superior economics compared to straight SSD primary storage solutions.
The solution supports more than 25 backup applications including Veeam, Commvault, Rubrik, NetBackup, Cohesity, Oracle RMAN Direct, and SQL dumps. ExaGrid’s approach allows backup applications to run their native deduplication—or disable it entirely—while the Repository Tier applies its own deduplication algorithms to achieve industry-leading storage efficiency ratios.
AI-Powered Security Framework Redefines Ransomware Recovery Standards
ExaGrid’s AI-Powered Retention Time-Lock represents a comprehensive ransomware defense framework. The Auto Detect & Guard feature identifies anomalies in backup patterns, immediately notifies administrators, and ensures recovery capabilities remain intact. The non-network-facing tier creates an architectural barrier that threat actors cannot traverse, even with administrative credentials.
The system implements delayed deletes—a cost-effective mechanism that preserves data availability while minimizing storage consumption during retention periods. Combined with immutable data objects, this multi-layered approach addresses the six critical backup storage requirements: fastest backups, fastest restores, true scale-out architecture with compute-and-capacity expansion, comprehensive ransomware recovery, all disaster recovery options (including replication to secondary sites, cross-replication, hub-and-spoke topology, multi-hop tertiary copies, and public cloud replication to AWS and Azure), and lowest total cost of ownership.
Strategic Flexibility for Hybrid Deployment Scenarios
The introduction of SSD options creates deployment flexibility previously unavailable in the backup storage market. Organizations can now architect solutions matching specific site requirements: all-SSD deployments for maximum performance and minimal data center footprint, SSD at core locations with HDD at secondary sites, or SSD for primary storage paired with HDD for disaster recovery cost optimization.
ExaGrid backs its solution with five-year price protection and a planned product obsolescence program that avoids forced upgrades. Andrews emphasized the company’s financial stability, noting 20 consecutive quarters of positive profit and loss, EBITDA, and free cash flow performance, with double-digit revenue growth projected for 2026.
About ExaGrid
ExaGrid provides Tiered Backup Storage with a unique disk-cache Landing Zone, long-term retention repository, scale-out architecture, and comprehensive security features, including AI-Powered Retention Time-Lock to recover from a ransomware attack. ExaGrid’s Landing Zone provides for the fastest backups, restores, and instant VM recoveries. The Repository Tier offers the lowest cost for long-term retention. ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture includes full appliances and ensures a fixed-length backup window as data grows, eliminating expensive forklift upgrades and planned product obsolescence. ExaGrid offers the only two-tiered backup storage approach with a non-network-facing tier (tiered air gap), delayed deletes, and immutable objects to recover from ransomware attacks.
ExaGrid has physical sales and pre-sales systems engineers in the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Benelux, Brazil, Canada, Chile, CIS, Colombia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nordics, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, and other regions.
