14 Hours to Backup and De-Duplicate 100TB

FalconStor Software, Inc. delivers the fastest backup and deduplication time in the industry with the FalconStor Virtual Tape Library (VTL) with deduplication solution. In addition to reducing backup, deduplication and restore time through optimization, the FalconStor VTL solution’s ability to leverage Fibre Channel for replicating deduplicated data further reduces the total time to DR. A critical metric for assessing enterprise readiness for full recovery from data center failure, total time to DR is measured by the time required to back up a given amount of data, write it to tape, deduplicate it, replicate it to a remote DR site, and restore the data to full availability.

FalconStor staged a test of its latest version of FalconStor VTL with deduplication in order to validate the performance of FalconStor VTL in a real data center configuration and to demonstrate a best-practice scenario. Measured were key performance criteria, including ingest rate, tape production, deduplication throughput, replication and recovery time.

“Total time to DR is critical to the resilience of any business that relies on 24-hour access to important applications,” said Lauren Whitehouse, analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group. “A high-performance backup infrastructure is critical to reducing a business’s exposure to downtime by ensuring data recovery and full return to operability in a timely manner. FalconStor has clearly taken the entire process from backup to recovery into consideration to achieve optimal efficiency in terms of both time and cost.”

“Other data protection vendors with deduplication focus on reduction ratios and backup speeds but fail to take into consideration all the processes needed to complete the DR-readiness cycle, including replication off site and restoration of data into an application-ready state at the DR facility,” said Wayne Lam, FalconStor co-founder and vice president. “FalconStor considered the whole picture in designing FalconStor VTL to integrate with any backup system and to enable and optimize the entire sequence of events within a data protection system. In addition, the FalconStor VTL system can scale without disruption or complexity as the business grows.”

“We have been selling FalconStor VTL with deduplication for some time now, and we have been very happy with each deployment,” said Israel Malowany, director of sales for VirtuIT Systems, a solutions and service provider based in New York. “FalconStor has designed the most scalable VTL with deduplication system on the market, and it keeps getting better. It delivers enterprise-class performance, stellar speed and deduplication rates, while growing seamlessly as our customer’s needs grow.”

In the test bed of 100 terabytes of production data, the performance measured was achieved with a single cluster of two FalconStor VTL nodes supported by four deduplication nodes. Running the backup and deduplication processes concurrently, the total time to backup and deduplicate the 100 terabytes of data was under 14 hours, yielding an average of 2.0 gigabytes per second. In the case where minimizing the total backup time is the major goal, the two-node VTL cluster delivered 2.8 gigabytes per second of backup speed, requiring a backup window of under 10 hours for the 100 terabytes. Physical tape production can be achieved directly through 4 gigabit Fibre Channel links by exporting tapes from FalconStor VTL to the physical tape library without using a separate media server. All hardware components used for the performance test are commonly available standard parts, including standard Linux-based servers and low-cost SATA-based storage subsystems with 4 gigabit Fibre Channel ports.

FalconStor VTL can scale up to an eight-node cluster with an additional eight-node deduplication cluster managing a global, shared data repository that can hold more than two petabytes of physical capacity or 40 petabytes of logical (deduplicated) capacity. This massive scalability allows for consolidated management of a large enterprise’s data and data protection processes, reducing complexity, time, cost and risk related to managing a collection of discrete repositories, as required by other deduplication solutions. The solution’s clustered architecture ensures maximum availability and reduced downtime and its associated cost.

Beyond backup data processing, FalconStor VTL features high-performance IP and Fibre Channel replication designed to minimize the replication window and thus reduce the risk of associated data loss. In addition to replicating backup data, FalconStor VTL includes a backup media server catalog replication feature that guarantees continuous consistency of the backup media catalog at the primary and the DR site to accelerate restoration of data to full operation. Once data is replicated to the DR site, FalconStor VTL enables high-speed restore of deduplicated data at a sustained rate that exceeds 1.2 gigabytes per second per node, demonstrating the fastest restore performance in the industry from a deduplicated repository; at this speed a 100 TB data set can be restored in less than 12 hours.

“One of our goals for this year was to add data backup services to our existing portfolio of recovery services. We considered several providers and determined the FalconStor solution provides businesses with complete critical data protection services more quickly, efficiently and cost effectively than they can do it themselves, and FalconStor VTL and deduplication technology helps us meet that goal,” said Walt Thomasson, managing director for Rentsys Recovery Services. “FalconStor software provides the foundation for our new FLEXDATA™ backup and recovery solution, allowing us to help our clients reduce their RTO and cut costs by reducing the amount of time, bandwidth and hardware required to back up and restore company data.”

“We deployed FalconStor VTL with deduplication to redesign our backup process for a more power-efficient data center,” said Sandor Orban, senior IT specialist for Sunrise. “With deduplication we have been able to reduce dramatically the amount of disk and tape we need to secure full backups of almost 70 terabytes of data. Now, with FalconStor VTL performance improvements, we can scale not only in capacity but also in speed and efficiency as our data continues to grow.”

“Before we fully deployed FalconStor VTL with deduplication and replication, we were vulnerable to long restore times in the event of a system fault because of the inefficiency of restoring from tape," said Sangwon Lee, deputy general manager at Korea East-West Power Company, Ltd. "But now with FalconStor VTL, we have eliminated a lot of wasted time. Because we rolled out our new backup and DR process in stages, we now can appreciate the full impact the total deployment has had on our backup and restore speed – giving us the security that we can become fully operational in less than a working day in the event of a major data center failure."