At the recent IT Press Tour, ExaGrid CEO Bill Andrews explained why, despite its competitors continuing to expand into backup software, cyber resilience platforms, cloud services, and data management suites, ExaGrid has spent the last 18 years focused solely on storing backup data more effectively. It's a strategy that's paying off massively.
ExaGrid currently supports over 5,200 customers across 108 countries, works with over 25 backup applications, and maintains partnerships with major global systems integrators including HCL and Kyndryl. Most impressive of all,l it has remained cash-positive, debt-free, and profitable while continuing to report double-digit growth.
The backup software market has been through a decade of consolidation. Veeam emerged as a dominant force in virtualized environments, while Rubrik and Cohesity challenged established players with more modern architectures. Cohesity's acquisition of Veritas further concentrated the market and created one of the industry's largest data protection portfolios.
Despite these shifts, the operational challenges facing infrastructure teams remain largely unchanged. Organizations still struggle with shrinking backup windows, growing data volumes, ransomware threats, disaster recovery requirements, and rising storage costs.
Backup storage is evolving, and many of the legacy solutions no longer align with the realities of modern backup environments.
A Different Approach To Backup Storage
ExaGrid's answer is called Tiered Backup Storage, which separates recent backup data from long-term retention data. Incoming backups land first in a high-performance Landing Zone, where they remain in their native format for rapid backup and recovery. Older data is then stored within a separate Repository Tier where deduplication reduces long-term storage requirements.
By keeping recent backups immediately accessible while separately deduplicating long-term retention data, ExaGrid can improve
operational performance and storage efficiency.
As data growth continues to place pressure on backup infrastructure, ExaGrid's scale-out architecture addresses this challenge by enabling organizations to add appliances incrementally without disrupting existing environments.
Unlike traditional scale-up systems that eventually require controller upgrades or forklift replacements, each ExaGrid appliance adds processing power, memory, network capacity, and storage capacity.
The company argues this allows backup performance to remain consistent as environments grow. According to ExaGrid, systems can scale to 32 appliances and support up to 6PB of full backups on hard-disk configurations, with larger capacities available through all-flash models.
It's a message that appears to be resonating with customers, with retention standing at 95.6 percent and 98 percent among the company's largest accounts.
Exagrid only Tiered Backup Storage approach largest independant vendor and cash positive according to Bill Andrews @ExaGrid #MultiCloud #DataManagement #DataProtection #SecondaryStorage #Backup #AllFlash #AFA #ITPT @ITPressTour 68th Edition pic.twitter.com/aqoX5vGpko
— The IT Press Tour (@ITPressTour) June 9, 2026
Ransomware Has Changed The Conversation
Backup discussions are increasingly revolving around cybersecurity rather than storage economics. Organizations must ensure their backups remain recoverable even when attackers gain administrative access to production environments. That's why ExaGrid's Repository Tier is intentionally non-network-facing and created what Andrews describes as a tiered air gap.
Additional protections include immutable storage, delayed-deletion policies, encryption, role-based access controls, multifactor authentication, IP allow listing, and external key management.
Backup infrastructure is now seen as an active participant in cyber resilience strategies rather than a passive storage repository. Recovery speed following an attack is now as important as prevention.
ExaGrid also introduced Auto Detect & Guard, which uses AI to identify abnormal deletion patterns and automatically extend retention protections until administrators can investigate. ExaGrid's architecture is designed around the assumption that businesses need to restore operations quickly, which helps explain the company's continued emphasis on maintaining recent backups in their native format.
One of the more notable announcements from the Boston event was ExaGrid's forthcoming support for Cohesity DataProtect. The addition fills what CEO Bill Andrews described as one of the final major gaps in the company's backup application ecosystem. Cohesity's acquisition of Veritas significantly expanded its market presence and customer base, making support increasingly important for channel partners and enterprise customers.
ExaGrid already integrates with a broad range of backup platforms, including Veeam, Commvault, NetBackup, Rubrik, IBM Spectrum Protect, HYCU, Acronis, Oracle RMAN, and others. Adding Cohesity strengthens the company's position as a storage platform that sits behind whichever backup software customers choose to deploy.
This strategy allows ExaGrid to benefit from shifts in the backup software market without competing directly with software vendors.
A Contrarian View Of The Cloud
Perhaps the most interesting part of the presentation was not technical.
Drawing on conversations with customers and sales teams, Andrews argued that many organizations continue to retain substantial on-premises environments while selectively consuming cloud services where they make economic sense.
With backup data proving particularly expensive to retain in public cloud environments due to storage charges, retrieval fees, and long-term retention costs. Andrews believes this is why some organizations are reconsidering earlier cloud migration decisions and bringing certain workloads back into their own facilities.
The Bigger Picture
While backup may not be the most glamorous segment of enterprise technology, it remains one of the few areas where performance is measured not by benchmarks or demonstrations, but by whether an organization can recover when something goes wrong.
Maybe this new reality helps explain why ExaGrid continues to find customers willing to look beyond their primary storage vendor and consider a specialist focused on making sure backup data is available when it is needed most.
ExaGrid will be joining David Marshall, Anthony Savvas, and me on the Across the Tech Pond podcast in the next few weeks. If you have any questions you would like me to ask, please leave a voicemail below to be part of the conversation.