In this interview from VeeamON 2026, Marc Crespi, director of business development and chief evangelist at ExaGrid Systems, joins theCUBE's Dave Vellante and Krista Case to discuss how purpose-built tiered backup storage is evolving to meet AI-era data protection and cyber resilience demands. Crespi explains ExaGrid's foundational scale-out architecture — where compute and storage always grow in tandem — and how its landing zone tier enables high-performance instant restore without the bottlenecks of inline deduplication. He underscores why ExaGrid positions itself as the storage of last resort, built to be the final line of defense when ransomware strikes and other systems have failed, backed by a comprehensive security framework developed well before the threat landscape demanded it.
The conversation also explores ExaGrid's AI-powered auto-detect and guard feature, a neural network embedded in the product that monitors normal backup and recovery patterns and alerts administrators when anomalous behavior suggests a potential attack. Crespi details the layered response model — including the ability to freeze all activity and enter recovery mode upon confirmed threat detection — alongside retention time lock and immutable objects that guard against mass encryption events. He addresses the volatile NAND market and supply chain pressures directly, noting that ExaGrid's proactive component investments have kept pricing stable and delivery windows at one to three days while competitors quote months-long lead times. Crespi also highlights the depth of ExaGrid's Veeam integration, pointing to how the landing zone architecture directly enables Instant Restore, and notes software-agnostic support for more than 25 backup tools as a key differentiator. From sustained double-digit revenue growth to a personal chapter leading the Lionheart Foundation's trauma recovery programs, Crespi offers a portrait of a company and a leader equally defined by technical purpose and human resilience.
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Marc Crespi, Exagrid
In this interview from VeeamON 2026, Marc Crespi, director of business development and chief evangelist at ExaGrid Systems, joins theCUBE's Dave Vellante and Krista Case to discuss how purpose-built tiered backup storage is evolving to meet AI-era data protection and cyber resilience demands. Crespi explains ExaGrid's foundational scale-out architecture — where compute and storage always grow in tandem — and how its landing zone tier enables high-performance instant restore without the bottlenecks of inline deduplication. He underscores why ExaGrid positions itself as the storage of last resort, built to be the final line of defense when ransomware strikes and other systems have failed, backed by a comprehensive security framework developed well before the threat landscape demanded it.
The conversation also explores ExaGrid's AI-powered auto-detect and guard feature, a neural network embedded in the product that monitors normal backup and recovery patterns and alerts administrators when anomalous behavior suggests a potential attack. Crespi details the layered response model — including the ability to freeze all activity and enter recovery mode upon confirmed threat detection — alongside retention time lock and immutable objects that guard against mass encryption events. He addresses the volatile NAND market and supply chain pressures directly, noting that ExaGrid's proactive component investments have kept pricing stable and delivery windows at one to three days while competitors quote months-long lead times. Crespi also highlights the depth of ExaGrid's Veeam integration, pointing to how the landing zone architecture directly enables Instant Restore, and notes software-agnostic support for more than 25 backup tools as a key differentiator. From sustained double-digit revenue growth to a personal chapter leading the Lionheart Foundation's trauma recovery programs, Crespi offers a portrait of a company and a leader equally defined by technical purpose and human resilience.
Director of Business Development and Chief EvangelistExaGrid
In this interview from VeeamON 2026, Marc Crespi, director of business development and chief evangelist at ExaGrid Systems, joins theCUBE's Dave Vellante and Krista Case to discuss how purpose-built tiered backup storage is evolving to meet AI-era data protection and cyber resilience demands. Crespi explains ExaGrid's foundational scale-out architecture — where compute and storage always grow in tandem — and how its landing zone tier enables high-performance instant restore without the bottlenecks of inline deduplication. He underscores why ExaGrid positions ...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
Does the cluster-based approach that scales both storage and compute for backup and recovery still apply in the AI era, and what does ExaGrid do?add
How does a backup/storage provider fit into the intersection of data protection and cybersecurity, and how can AI and storage features (e.g., retention time‑lock, immutable objects) be used to detect threats and ensure data resilience?add
How has the relationship between the organization and Veeam evolved over time, and where is it expected to go?add
Are you still growing and innovating compared with other vendors in this market, and are you software‑agnostic (for example, with partners like Veeam)?add
>> Welcome back to Hudson Yards in New York City. We're here at Convene, a new venue. We're talking about the AI data and trust layer. One of the things about Veeam, a hallmark of Veeam has been its partnerships. One of the partners is ExaGrid. Marc Crespi is here. He's the director of business development. He's the chief evangelist back at ExaGrid. Good to see you again.
Marc Crespi
>> Great to be back. Great to see you, Dave. Hi, Krista.
Krista Case
>> Hi, Marc.
Dave Vellante
>> We talked in 2017, I think it was in New Orleans. It was a fun VeeamON. And I recall at the time you were explaining to me ExaGrid's unique value, and you were pointing out that a lot of systems have run out of gas.
Marc Crespi
>> Yes.
Dave Vellante
>> And you guys had this, I'll call it a cluster approach, where you scale not only storage, but you can scale compute to have the horsepower necessary to handle the backup and, importantly, the recovery.
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> So, I want to start there, because is that same concept ... Does it apply now to the AI world? So, tell us about ExaGrid, what you guys are all about, and I want to dig into that a little bit.
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah. You got a great memory. 2017. Yeah. So, those core principles still very much apply, but there's been a lot added to it with AI and with grants and the threats that are out there. So, we've added a whole host of comprehensive security and so on. And we're really in the business of replacing discs these days. When I started at ExaGrid it was a tape replacement market, but we're 20 years past that now. So, what we find is that customers are usually ... They're backing up to some form of primary storage or they may have an inline deduplication appliance. And that's also really the two categories except for us. So, we're in the tiered backup storage category. A category we own to ourselves. And we took what was good about straight disc or primary storage, got rid of the cons, took what was good about inline deduplication, which is the economics, got rid of the cons, and created a best of both worlds approach with tiered backup storage with a very comprehensive security framework for this new world.
Krista Case
>> Yeah. So, Marc, I'd love to understand how the topics we're hearing today at Veeam ... Right? The need to have this resilience and recovery, but at AI machine speed. Right?
Marc Crespi
>> Right.
Krista Case
>> And, also, just the volume of data that's being generated today. So, how does that change these data backup and recovery requirements?
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah. Well, obviously, it has a profound impact and in the keynote, Anand talked a lot about the additions to Veeam around AI and threat detection and so on. In the storage side of it, we are the storage of last resort. So, we have to have a bulletproof framework, which we have with our S3 support, we have a feature called retention time lock, which, basically, delays, deletes, because we don't know whether they're operational or malicious. So, a customer can delay deletes for a period of time until they know for sure it was an appropriate delete. We have immutable objects. So, we won't suffer from a mass encryption. So, our role in that whole paradigm is to be the storage of last resort, the storage you can count on when all else fails.
Dave Vellante
>> So, what do you make of this ... The intersection we've seen it now for the last several years, the intersection between data protection, cybersecurity. Obviously, Veeam's doubling down on that pretty heavily. How do you guys fit into that? What are your thoughts on that market trend?
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah. So, cybersecurity or cyber resilience, somewhat of an umbrella term, like so many other things. And there's many facets to it. And where we fit into it is the data has to be there in the event of attack. So, we recently added something called AI-powered auto-detect and guard. So, we built in a neural network into our product, we actually monitored normal data patterns that occur during backup and recovery and restore and retention grooming, and all those sort of things. And if we see a pattern based on what we've learned previously, that does not match what we've learned previously. We will alert the administrator, we alert the security officer in the organization, and then they can take appropriate action. They can indicate this wasn't expected behavior, and it's going to occur again. So, AI, the neural network will learn from that, and not alert again. They can say, "This was a one-time event, but it was us. So, we're going to allow it, but don't learn from it." And then the third one is this is actually an attack, and at which point everything is frozen and the customer can go into recovery mode.
Dave Vellante
>> So, Marc, there are, I'll call it, macro market changes.
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> Cloud, work from home, containers.
Marc Crespi
>> Yup.
Dave Vellante
>> AI. Okay. Those are the big market vectors that you have to navigate.
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> And there's also these other, I'll call them, microtechnology changes. And one of the things that AI, you hear about AI factories has brought in is ... And ever since I've been in this business there's been a storage hierarchy. There's been memory up top and tape down at the bottom, and everything else in between.
Marc Crespi
>> Right.
Dave Vellante
>> It's actually getting more and more granular. You go to NVIDIA GTC. You hear about SRAMs and high bandwidth memories, and low power memories, and KV caches, and all this stuff.
Marc Crespi
>> Sure.
Dave Vellante
>> First flashes in there, spinning discuses, going through the roof, their stock price. So, that's back. Tape is still alive. The hierarchy is getting more granular.
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> What does that mean for ExaGrid? Is all that irrelevant to you guys? Or do you have to navigate those changes? What does it mean for your technology and, ultimately, for customer value?
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah. It's a great question. We can take a simpler view of it. It's, certainly, not irrelevant, because in the data protection game, it's about performance. It's about how fast can I do things? How fast can I protect the data? And how fast can I ... More importantly, how fast can I get the data back? At the storage level, it's simple. Right? You've got hard disc drive technology. We still lead the industry in performance for that. In fact, we've won bake-offs against other SSD products with our HDD product. However, we also just introduced a whole line of SSV-only products. There are certain customers in certain scenarios where they want that level of SSD performance, they want the green benefits, the rack space power cooling, and we offer that as well. As far as the very granular layers, it doesn't come into play so much in the backup storage realm. So, we can talk about it more simply, but, certainly, not irrelevant.
Dave Vellante
>> Well, of course, you mentioned it. Obviously, supply chain is something that you have to navigate.
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> Price of NAND is going through the roof.
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> Six months ago, the neoclouds were like, "No. No. We only do SSD or flash."
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> Now they're like, "Where can I get me some spinning disc?"
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah. Well, I have a good plug for that. Because we're such a healthy company financially, and because we lived through COVID, sorry to invoke that word, but we saw what supply shortages can do to our customers, and to us, by extension, obviously. So, we made some very strategic investments upfront, bought way ahead on components, and so on. So, unlike many, we're able to still say to customers that our prices have not gone up significantly. We can still ship product in one to three days from the time you order it. It'll be onsite and ready to go. We're hearing from our customers that with other products, the quotes are only valid for a day or two. We still kept our window for quotes, that they won't get product for seven or eight months or longer, and we've been able to navigate all of that. And we'll be able to, at least, through the end of this year, if not longer.
Dave Vellante
>> That's great. I think NAND is more volatile than the price of oil these days.
Marc Crespi
>> Oh, so many percent in just the last couple of months.
Dave Vellante
>> It's incredible.
Marc Crespi
>> It is incredible.
Dave Vellante
>> So, talk a little bit about your relationship with Veeam.
Marc Crespi
>> Sure.
Dave Vellante
>> It goes back many, many years. How has it evolved? Where do you guys want to see it go?
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah. So, it's a longstanding relationship with Veeam, and I can remember in the early days some of our early meetings together, and they started talking about this thing called Instant Restore.
Dave Vellante
>> Yeah.
Marc Crespi
>> And it was the first time we heard the phrase. And, in fact, Anand today mentioned that they had invented it and pioneered it. We realized at that time that we were really in the backup storage realm, now what we call tiered backup storage, uniquely positioned to support that capability, because unlike the inline deduplication appliances where everything is deduplicated on the way in and stored fully deduplicated, we have that tier we call our landing zone, which is our restore tier. And that data is not deduplicated. It's in whatever form the backup application, in this case, Veeam sent to us. We also have those copies deduplicated for economics, but when it comes to things like instant restore, we can go ahead and serve that up with very high performance. And then our scalability as well has continued to be a very important thing with Veeam. So, as Veeam continues to innovate and evolve, we're always looking for opportunities for us to deeply integrate, because unlike primary storage and secondary storage, that multipurpose use it for whatever, we are built for this purpose. And, therefore, we can deeply integrate with our partners and really highlight the technology they bring to bear, that you can't do with regular old disc, because the infrastructure is not there.
Dave Vellante
>> What can you tell us about ExaGrid as a company? You mentioned you're profitable.
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> For those who may not be familiar with the company, a little bit about the history-
Marc Crespi
>> Sure....
Dave Vellante
>> I think of you as you're not one of these companies that's always just trying to ride the next wave necessarily.
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> You ride waves, but you stick to your knitting. So, tell us more about the company.
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah. I've been there pretty much from the beginning.
Dave Vellante
>> Right. Right.
Marc Crespi
>> So, I can give you a bird's eye view. Bird brain's eye view, however, you want to look at it. So, like I said, we started when tape was still roaming the Earth, dinosaurs, and people were just itching to go to disc. But we made a couple of fundamental decisions at the beginning that other vendors didn't make. One was this whole idea of deduplication. You have to have it for economics. It's a must-have. Otherwise, disc is too expensive. But it can be a performance hit, if you don't do it appropriately. So, we avoided monolithic inline deduplication, and said, "We need something adaptive that favors the backup window, favors the restore time, but still does things in parallel, so, that customers have all the deduplicated data stored, replicated," et cetera. The other thing we got fundamentally right at the beginning was scalability. We recognized that this was a high throughput game. It wasn't a game where you could have a single point of entry into a product, and that that thing was going to do all the work no matter how much capacity you strap to it. So, we came up with scale-out as a way of always adding performance with capacity. So, every ExaGrid appliance and scale-out system is a full server with network process or memory, disc, et cetera. So, if my workload doubles, my performance profile doubles. And then more recently, we focused very early on the coming ransomware threats and security and developed a very robust comprehensive security framework that makes sure that all of our customers can recover from a ransomware event from ExaGrid.
Dave Vellante
>> Okay. I was going to ask you what you optimize for, but, obviously, you optimize for zillions.
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> Based on that last statement.
Marc Crespi
>> Right.
Dave Vellante
>> You optimize on getting the data off fast into your system and recovering quickly. Those are the three big optimization points?
Krista Case
>> Yeah.
Marc Crespi
>> They are. And it's shown in our numbers. We're really the only vendor in this space growing double digits at this point, year over year over year. And the other thing is we're really the only ones with a purpose-built product in this category that's still aggressively innovating. Primary storage innovates in its zone and so on, secondary storage. The inline deduplication product stream has slowed down. There's just not many blockbuster new capabilities coming out, yet year after year after year, we're innovating very aggressively. We've got a great engineering team, and because we're built for this purpose, we're not a general purpose product, we're constantly innovating in this space, and have big investments and long-term roadmaps planned. So, our customers know we're going to keep up with the market. It's not going to be a dead-end product that doesn't innovate.
Dave Vellante
>> And, obviously, Veeam is a huge partner, but you're software-agnostic. Is that right?
Marc Crespi
>> Yes. We are agnostic. We scored over 25 different types, and many customers have multiple tools in their environment. They may be using Veeam as their primary, but they have a couple of specialty tools they may use for a specific purpose. So, we're able to zip onto all of it. Yes.
Krista Case
>> So, Marc, to me, it's a really clear value proposition when we talk about resilience and addressing data protection requirements in this AI era. Here at VeeamON today a big headline discussion is the acquisition of Securiti AI by Veeam and how they're integrating capabilities like GSP MAI posture management into their capabilities.
Marc Crespi
>> Yup.
Krista Case
>> What does that mean for ExaGrid as a partner? Are there opportunities to maybe leverage your landing tier with faster performance to be able to serve some of this more sensitive data? For example.
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah. I think it's two-fold. One is because of our performance optimizations, some of the functionality data inspection things require very strong performance from the storage and we deliver on that. But we also stay in our lane. Those are things that really are uniquely capabilities that should live in the software. And so, we don't look to duplicate or complicate things by having the storage step out of its lane, and do things that really the software was meant to do. Our role is to provide the best performance, scalability, and security for the data that's being sent to us, and to not do anything that interferes with any of that functionality by putting deduplication in the middle of it, or not scaling well or those sorts of things. So, we're a very diligent partner to make sure we showcase all of these wonderful new capabilities that are coming down the road.
Dave Vellante
>> You took some time out of the industry to do I think it was the Lionheart Foundation.
Marc Crespi
>> Yes. Yes.
Dave Vellante
>> Right?
Marc Crespi
>> The Lionheart Foundation.
Dave Vellante
>> Explain what that was. Why'd you do that? What brought you back into the industry?
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> A little personal session-
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah. Great question. Yeah. I have been in technology for a couple of decades, and I just wanted to see if I could try something completely new that I didn't understand. So, I saw this wonderful organization and they needed an executive director. I didn't think, honestly, that they would give me a second look, but I wrote a letter to the founder. And I was there for two years. It's a wonderful, wonderful organization, the Lionheart Foundation. And I'm on the board now of the organization. And the work they're doing is so incredible and so important. I'm honored to have been a part of it, and to remain a part of it.
Dave Vellante
>> And a focus on mental health. Yes?
Marc Crespi
>> Yes.
Dave Vellante
>> Is that right?
Marc Crespi
>> Yeah. It deals with the trauma-impacted populations. So, I think we overlook the role trauma plays in society, and the dysfunction that we see in society. It's about programs that help people to heal, recover from trauma, and lead productive lives. And I miss technology, I love both, but when it came time talking to Mr. Andrews, our CEO on the phone, he said, "Why don't you come back here?" And I'm like, "I'd love to."
Dave Vellante
>> Well, welcome back to the arena, Marc.
Marc Crespi
>> Thank you.
Dave Vellante
>> Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it.
Marc Crespi
>> Yes. Thank you.
Dave Vellante
>> All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for Krista Case. We're here at VeeamON 2026 in the Big Apple. Right back after this short break.
Dave Vellante
Krista Case