Hi Dave
In case it's of any use here's our experience.

We trialled a single Data Domain (DD) system back in 2007 and loved it.
We saved up ;-))

In April we installed 4 DD systems (varying sizes), one at each of our sites, 
and have been using them in anger ever since.
We don't use VTL, we keep it simple and just NFS mount the DD space.
3 of the DD's replicate over the WAN to the 4th at our HQ and the 4th 
replicates its 'local' data back to ours, so we have 2 copies of data - 1 
off-site. We ditched the tape libraries at 3 of the sites and HQ clone to tape 
once a month for our 'nice warm fuzzy feeling - just in case' tape backups.

We directly connect the storage nodes to the DD's (private IP) and bond 3x1GB 
NIC's and turned on Jumbo Frames (that's the thing that made the most 
difference).
We do a mix of client and NDMP backups.

Really happy with the DD - looking at stats from about July for our site, I see 
we'd sent 290TB of data to it which it stored in 19TB (that's over 90% 
'compression').  We keep roughly 3 months backup data on the system.  Your 
mileage may vary of course - we found the hardest thing was sizing the boxes in 
the first place.

Godd luck with whatever you choose, but I just thought I'd say I'm well pleased 
with the DD de-dupe solution we have.  The replication has been a godsend.

Cheeers... Allan.

 

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 7:14 PM, Werth, Dave <dave.werth AT garmin DOT com> 
wrote:

> Folks,
>
> We are working on next year's budget.  I'm trying to figure out what sort
> of upgrade to our current hardware we want to do.
>
> Currently we are disk to tape to tape (clone).  We want to switch to a disk
> to disk to tape setup to speed up backups and restores.
>
> My thinking is along the lines of a VTL with de-duplication.
>
> Does anyone have any comments on the subject?
>
> Thanks, Dave
>
> Dave Werth
> Garmin AT, Inc.
> Salem, Oregon
>
>
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