Entries categorized under “Deduplication”

Quantum is aiming for the enterprise with its deduplication technology and looks to make a serious run at the enterprise datacenter with its DXi7500. Designed to anchor Quantum's deduplication strategy, companies can use the scalable DXi7500 when it is receiving replicated data from Quantum's DXi3500 or DXi5500 appliances in remote offices; replicating to disaster recovery site(s); or deduplicating terabytes of data during nightly backup jobs in the datacenter. To accomplish this, Quantum designed the DXi7500 to become the focal point for its DXi portfolio. (read more)

In the face of these fundamental shifts among corporate data centers in server data protection and virtualization, data protection software needs to do more than just adapt. It needs to embrace backup-to-disk and server virtualization in order to transform data protection software into an information recovery platform. That is exactly what today's 8.0 release of Asigra Televaulting brings to the table in the following ways: (read more)

One can hardly have a conversation about storage management these days without the topic of archiving surfacing. Part of the reason that archiving is commanding more attention is because as companies create and keep ever greater amounts of referential data on their production storage systems, it is creating a host of new problems (read more)

Paulk revealed that he is now in full production with the production code loaded on the NEC HYDRAstor. However he is still using the same hardware configuration (two Accelerator Nodes and four Storage Nodes) that he started out using due to the high deduplication ratio that he is achieving with the HYDRAstor. Last fall he was achieving a 17:1 deduplication ratio and hoped to eventually achieve a 35:1 ratio. Six months later, his deduplication ratio is now approximately 39:1 which has mitigated his need to buy additional capacity and has driven his cost/GB down to approximately 70¢/GB. "It's like getting 390 TB for the price of 10 TBs," says Paulk. (read more)

Today and tomorrow I am putting on both my reporter and analyst hats. Living in Omaha, NE, I am only a hop, skip and jump away from Minneapolis, MN, so I took the opportunity to drive up here to attend Compellent's annual C-Drive user conference that runs from May 6 - May 8 and do some live, on-site blogging about my experiences while I am here. Already a few notable items to report from last night's customer reception and this morning's opening presentation. (read more)

Bringing backup data from remote and branch offices back to a home office is a particularly thorny problem that enterprises continue to face. Directly sending nightly full, incremental or differential backup jobs over a wide area network (WAN) connection back to the home office can saturate the WAN link and cause backups to exceed backup windows and result in failed backups. However the current procedure of backing up data to disk or tape at the remote site perpetuates the problem of how to most efficiently and securely transmit backup data back to the home office or disaster recovery site. (read more)

In case no one has noticed lately, the number of ways in which companies can configure disk-based storage systems to protect their data has multiplied significantly. This fact was brought clearly into focus by a pre-recorded video lecture that I recently watched on Overland Storage's Tiered Data Protection (TDP) website. (read more)

Israel's The Marker and Globes Online are reporting this morning that IBM has made it official that it is acquiring Diligent Technologies. Though the two sources differ as to the terms of the deal (Globes Online reports $200 million while The Marker reports $168 million), my sources in Israel's IT community tell me that the $168 million number is the more accurate of the two numbers. Under the terms of the deal, IBM will pay $160 million for Diligent's intellectual property while the balance would be used to keep some of the existing employees onboard. (read more)

It is for these types of reasons that Quantum's field marketing and sales organization has developed what it refers to as its regional solutions specialists or "Tiger" teams to help businesses determine what size DXi deduplicating appliance is the best fit for its customer environments. When dealing with Quantum customers, their mission is to ensure and verify every customer has a positive experience with Quantum's deduplicating appliances. To do this, a core tenant of their responsibilities is doing the front end analysis that includes customer interviews and site surveys. (read more)

In part one of this two-part series, NEC's Director of Business Development, Dr. Christian Toelg, answered some specific technical questions about how Accelerator Nodes and Storage Nodes differ from one another. This second part takes a look at what specific advantages NEC's HYDRAstore grid storage architecture has over siloed, two controller storage system architectures when performing deduplication. (read more)

Day 1 of the Spring 2008 Storage Networking World is Orlando, Florida, is now in the books and with it came some interesting tidbits but nothing what I consider earth-shattering - at least at this point. First briefing of the conference was with Permabit's CEO Tom Cook, CTO Jered Floyd and VP of Marketing, Mike Ivanov. (read more)

The last enterprise company at which I worked used at least five different products to do backup and there may have been more. This amalgamation of backup products occurred over a period of years and mostly by happenstance. Acquisitions of and mergers with other companies; internal consolidations; specific backup requirements for certain applications; and, as often as not, the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing, contributed to the company ending up with a menagerie of backup products to manage. (read more)

HYDRAstor uses a two-step inline process to deduplicate data. Two or more Accelerator Nodes may see the same file at the same time. However, Accelerator Nodes only have a part of the information required to do deduplication and do not maintain the entire global deduplication index. So the Accelerator Nodes chunk up each file into small chunks, eliminate as many duplicates as possible and then send the remaining chunks to the Storage Nodes. (read more)

I have expressed skepticism in the past about Diligent Technologies' ProtecTIER™ in light of the fact its primary go-to-market strategy is the enterprise open systems and mainframe environments. This strategy prompts me to exercise extreme diligence about their technology and architecture before endorsing it. The reason? The speeds and feeds that ProtecTIER is likely to encounter in enterprise shops are unlike what inline deduplication appliances will experience in small and midsize businesses and enterprises. (read more)

The primary reason that many deduplicating appliances create data silos is that they are based on the traditional dual-controller storage system architecture. Dual-controller storage systems typically use two clustered servers that sit in front of a fixed pool of storage. The NEC HYDRAstor functions as one logical storage system regardless of how much performance or capacity a company adds so it can globally deduplicate all company archive or backup data stored on it (read more)

Deduplicating appliances have gained mindshare with users because it makes disk as cheap, or cheaper, than tape by delivering data reduction ratios of 15:1 or more while expediting backups which solves their short term backup problems. However companies also need to consider, when selecting a deduplication product, how well it will best serve them in the long term. The capability to globally deduplicate data is very powerful, but most deduplicating storage appliances are limited in scope to just that one appliance. (read more)

VMware comes with more than its fair share of "gotchas" for the uninitiated and software licensing costs for VMware VMs are one "gotcha" that may sneak up on unsuspecting companies. Asigra Televaulting's capacity-based licensing model that is based on the size of the backup data store after it is globally deduplicated doesn't really get any better from a cost and management perspective. Since backup software is typically viewed as an expense by companies anyway, this licensing model ensures all data remains protected while adding minimal costs to the corporate bottom line. (read more)

Data migrations are a painful part of storage management in most enterprise shops today. Driven by storage technology refreshes, storage upgrades, or optimizing data placement on storage systems to improve application performance, data migrations are an ongoing and laborious part of enterprise data management. Introducing disk into the backup process can once again re-introduce the pain point of data migrations. While the initial benefits that companies derive from using disk in any of its different formats in the backup process are usually substantial, the effort associated with managing and migrating backup data from disk to tape over time can become problematic. (read more)

CDP and deduplication are now on the forefront of the minds of more enterprise managers as they contemplate how to best introduce disk-based data protection into their backup environment. Contributing to the difficulty in selecting one of these technologies is that they address different data protection needs: CDP provides shorter application recovery time and point objectives while deduplication reduces disk data storage requirements. To better understand how Asigra's Televaulting delivers on these features in an agentless fashion, I spoke with Marc Staimer, President of Dragon Slayer Consulting. (read more)

Keep up to date with Jerome's key publications; last month on the 28th Jerome wrote how value added resellers and professional services firms can leverage VTLs when selling services like recovery management, eDiscovery and email archiving.Read More at SearchStorageChannel.comCommVault:Simpana and... (read more)