Winners were determined by their ratings on six key criteria: innovation, performance, easy integration into existing environments, ease of use and manageability, as well as robust functionality and high value to end-users. The awards were judged by the Storage magazine-SearchStorage.com editorial staff, in conjunction with a team of end users, industry experts, analysts, and consultants.

"Customers are frustrated with the lack of reliability, slow performance and management headaches of tape back-up", stated Bill Hobbib, vice president of marketing, ExaGrid Systems Inc. "ExaGrid's award-winning technology provides for the fastest and most reliable back-ups and restores, and as data grows ExaGrid scales without performance degradation or forklift upgrades. ExaGrid is the first vendor to deliver disk back-up with data deduplication at a cost that approaches the price of tape. We're pleased that the judging team at Storage magazine-SearchStorage.com recognized ExaGrid for breaking open the economics of disk back-up by combining performance, scalability and price in a winning solution that works for customers in today's constrained IT spending environment."

In the feature story about the category winning ExaGrid EX10000E, the editors of TechTarget's Storage Media Group wrote: "The company responded to another industry-wide theme in 2009: relentless data growth, regardless of company size, coupled with flat or declining budgets. With the release of the EX10000E, consisting of up to 10 10TB server nodes for a total capacity of 100TB, new customers can store more data in less space than with previous models. But customers with previously released smaller nodes won't have to rip and replace existing clusters; the new larger node can be mixed and matched with 1TB to 5TB nodes, with overall management via a single user interface."

The editors went on to say: "Each node added to a cluster brings memory and processing power, boosting performance of data deduplication processing along with the additional capacity. In keeping with a theme of frugality in a down economy, the EX10000E consumes 50% less power than previous generations. As one of our judges put it, 'ExaGrid remains one of the few vendors thinking about how a system grows with the customer. Kudos on taking it to the next level'."

ExaGrid has nearly 150 real-world customer success stories detailing customers' first-hand experiences with the ExaGrid disk back-up system. This is more than all other vendors combined. The success stories are available via the ExaGrid website and include case studies from leaders like Adventist Health, Christian Broadcasting Network, Four Seasons Resort, Kingston Technology, Konica Minolta, Morningstar, Dublin City University and the Conwy & Denbighshire NHS Trust (UK National Health Service).