Experience with Protect Tier and Data Domain

[etchingsj]

We are evaluating both ProtectTier and data Domain.
Does anyone have experiences with both?

I have DD experience but have yet to see ProtectTier.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

 

[philburg2]

Our setup running compressed backups (to keep from killing the network) seemed to work better on DD than ProtectTier. We only see reduction rates around 1.7 to 2.2 however, so it's not a lot per se.

 

[dharr18]

I have worked with both in extensive testing. Dedup rates were very similar to what was already expressed by philburg2. Feel free to email or pm me for more detailed answers or questions.

 

[etchingsj]

Does ProtectTier only offer VTL or can it do NFS like Data Domain?
Thanks!

 

[Hema]

I vote for DD. We've been using ProtecTIER for a year, that was giving loads of trouble in terms of tape consumption and devices compatibility(in solaris).
We use EMC DD now(DD880),which is quite stable interms of data write speed and tape usage. You have to pay more for DD than VTL.

Does ProtectTier only offer VTL or can it do NFS like Data Domain?
Thanks!

I've not seen NFS licensing option in ProtecTIER

 

[rowl]

I had an environment with 12 ProtecTIER systems at my last job. Dedup rates that I saw were in the 4:1 to 6:1 for TSM backups. My biggest complaint was the single stream performance. While in aggregate the system could achieve the documented 400MB/s speeds, a single session could only achieve up to 20MB/s. Had to get at least 16 concurrent streams going to get the performance where it needed to be.

As I recall ProtecTIER was going to be offering nfs and cifs connectivity next year, but they told me that several years in a row, so I don't know where that is at.

I have been testing Data Domain with TSM but as nfs storage, not a VTL. This works quite well, after a couple months I see my TSM 5.5 backups achieving 9:1 dedup. This is all file system backups, no databases. So far my experience with DD has been positive.

-Al

 

[Toro]

ProtecTier supports NFS.

 

[nabanes]

I never use DD, but yes, you can configure the ProtecTIER FSI for NFS protocol. The ProtecTIER FSI for NFS emulates a Network File System that is accessed by UNIX Operating Systems. The FSI-NFS file system presents a virtualized hierarchy of file systems, directories, and files to UNIX NFS clients. The ProtecTIER FSI is intended to be used for backup and restore of data sets by using a backup application.