Data Domain Accelerates De-Dupe

Data Domain, Inc. announced the availability of its new platform operating software, accelerating the backup throughput of its current product line up to 100% from initial product specifications without any additional hardware or disk provisioning. With a simple software upgrade, Data Domain is delivering new levels of performance across all systems and customer types — from demanding data center environments to remote offices at the edge. Users can reduce backup windows and benefit from faster time-to-DR synch when replicating. The new Data Domain operating system software, DD OS 4.6, is available now at no extra charge to existing Data Domain users with standard system support agreements.

The Data Domain operating system uses its proprietary Stream Informed Segment Layout (SISL) technology to achieve high throughput while minimizing system and disk hardware. SISL is CPU-centric and software-based. This means that without the use of additional controllers, compression hardware or extra disk, continuous improvement in software can have an enormous effect on throughput rates and delivered value over time.

While performance can increase on all systems across all protocols, large data centers using Data Domain’s flagship DD690 system with Veritas NetBackup OpenStorage (OST) by Symantec and 10 Gb Ethernet, can now support accelerated backup throughput of up to 750 MB/s, or 2.7 TB / hour. This is approximately 90% faster than the DD690’s best throughput when introduced in May 2008. This new benchmark was established with the minimum DD690 configuration of 2 disk shelves and benefits from extra tuning and parallelism possible with this combination of fabric and software.

"The old arguments are no longer valid," said Tony Asaro, Senior Consultant and Founder of the INI Group. "Data Domain’s performance challenges the high-end VTL systems and they are going to keep getting better. Additionally, their performance crushes the inline versus post process dedupe debate. If you think about it, Data Domain stores data faster deduplicated than many solutions can just get data to disk."

The following performance improvement ratings show the approximate maximum backup throughput Data Domain systems can achieve in aggregate multi-stream tests with DD OS 4.6 compared with the initial system throughput at introduction:

Customers Validate Benefits of DD OS 4.6
Regency Centers is a national developer, owner and operator of grocery-anchored and community shopping centers with more than 440 premier shopping centers located in nearly every major U.S. market. By implementing best of breed storage technologies, including a Data Domain DD690 system with two ES20 expansion shelves utilizing the Data Domain OST software option with Veritas NetBackup by Symantec, Regency Centers has optimized and consolidated its backups and simplified administration and management of its business-critical Exchange and file server data.

"We are a growing shop and the tape paradigm no longer worked for us. Completing our nightly backups within the established window is critical for our operations, and a goal that drove the purchase of Data Domain was to hit a six-hour backup objective," said Rich VanLare, Network Administrator for Regency Centers. "Today, the Data Domain DD690 system has exceeded our performance expectations — it just screams — and our nightly backups are typically completed in about four hours. Equally important, the seamless integration with NetBackup using OST allows us to allocate a single disk pool instead of dealing with the management burden and overhead associated with creating virtual tapes. And as we migrate to DDOS 4.6, we’re eager to take advantage of the additional performance and manageability benefits."

"Back in 2006, Spartech was the first Data Domain customer in the St. Louis area and we’ve since deployed multiple Data Domain systems to completely replace tape across our IT operations," said Mark Holland, Manager of IT Operations for Spartech Corporation, a producer of engineered plastic sheet, polymeric compounds and engineered products. "We are strong supporters of optimized inline deduplication storage and the benefits it has delivered to our organization. The latest DD OS should bring even faster backups and replication across our business-critical applications and we’re looking forward to implementing it."

"We are a 24/7 organization so off-hour backups are not really an option," said Jules Thomas, Senior Systems Administrator for PITT OHIO EXPRESS, a customer-centric regional shipping and freight organization. "The performance of Data Domain’s optimized inline deduplication architecture is an essential factor that allows us to complete full Virtual Machine backups via VMDK to our DD565 system on a daily basis with minimum impact on space requirements. As a NetBackup shop, we are particularly interested in transitioning to DD OS 4.6, as the performance increase should accommodate VMDK backups extremely well — likely allowing us to perform multiple full daily backups on our more critical servers."

"Backup challenges became a thing of the past when we implemented our Data Domain system in 2006," says Lisa Hazen, Director of IT at Labcyte Inc., a provider of liquid handling technology for pharmaceutical and life science applications. "Since then, we’ve regularly updated our Data Domain operating software and have been amazed at the stability and ease of the Data Domain OS update process. This new performance upgrade is both exciting and useful. Having recently acquired a company in Ireland, our backup window is rapidly shrinking. So the potential of getting our backup jobs done in less time is a very attractive proposition. Our data continues to grow and, quite frankly, there aren’t that many vendors who will deliver a performance increase of this measure without attaching a significant cost."

"This kind of massive performance upgrade on current systems hardware, driven by optimized software with minimum disk configurations, showcases the scalability of our proprietary SISL architecture," said Brian Biles, VP of Product Management at Data Domain. "Data Domain continues to bypass the disk I/O bottleneck and instead rides the CPU price/performance curve. This announcement reconfirms the power of our optimized inline deduplication approach."