John,
Thanks for the great read. One of the reasons I like Diligent (on paper
anyway) is that I can roll my own as they say. With DD, I only have their
hardware options. With Diligent, I can build a real IO brute and hook it up
to screaming fast disks. This way I can upgrade the components over time
rather then the whole unit. Now that's not to say I am in love with
Diligent. I really like DD as well. As others have said (as have you),
they really have the most mature product on the market (as far as I can
tell) and that goes a long way. Also their product is no slouch for IO
either.
But one thing that I would really like to know is how any of these products
behave for concurrent operations. IE, how does DD handle (IO wise) doing a
backup and restore at the same time? Or even just a restore (in a DR
situation). Most numbers I see on deduping vendors web sites are the
screaming fast backups, but I don't see much about restores. So how
expensive is un-deduping?
Thanks
--Brett
On Nov 2, 2007 2:27 AM, John Chaney (ChaneyFamily) <john AT chaneyfamily DOT
biz>
wrote:
> Brett & Graeme,
>
> I thought I'd reply to both of you on this string since I has both emails.
>
> Graeme could not be more correct. I work for a VAR that sells all of the
> backup devices (i.e. tape, and disk) and have been selling and installing
> DataDomain for about 4 years. We also sell Quantum, SUN/STK, EMC, etc.
>
> In my (and our engineers that design/install backup solutions) opinion the
> DataDomain is way ahead of the curve when it comes to backup-to-disk and
> dedupe. The simplicity of the device and the power of the dedupe and
> replication makes managing backups far easier than any other solution out
> there.
>
> I have been installing Networker for over 15 years and have seen many
> options for backing up data such as tape drive sharing, VTL's and block
> level backups. I have seen the pitfalls due to the complexities of these
> solutions and have learn to stay away from at least drive sharing and VTL's.
> Block-level has its place in a few situations.
>
> As for DataDomain vs. Diligent there is no comparison. I don't even
> consider Diligent as a product ready to ship because it really doesn't do
> anything. It requires a SAN (i.e. FC) which means it cannot be shared
> between Storage Nodes like the DataDomain. It requires 3rd party (i.e.
> hardware vendor) replication, so there goes the savings on the WAN
> bandwidth. All they really have is a dedupe engine in from of SAN disk.
> Who cares unless no one else did dedupe.
>
> As for Quantum, they claim that DataDomain has to pay them a royalty with
> each Restorer sold. That's only because they purchased RockSoft who had the
> patent on the basic commonality factoring methodology. Using a similar
> method is one thing but creating a viable product is another. DataDomain
> has taken that basic concept and expanded on it exponentially where Quantum
> can't even get it off the ground. This is coming from a few failed Quantum
> implementations that our company has been involved with. DataDomain has
> already paid Quantum for the right to use the patent just in case you were
> not aware of it. Another thing is that Quantum does dedupe on the backend.
>
> Gridstor is another option but I haven't actually used the product so I'm
> not sure of the details.
>
> All in all, I look at DataDomain as a device that I can add to as needed
> (much like tape devices in a library). The compression is far greater than
> tape and it's much more reliable.
>
> Also, DataDomain support is awesome! Up until a year ago I always talked
> to the developers when I called in with an issue while onsite. With their
> growth they now have level 1 & 2 support like other big companies but even
> those guys are great. I installed 2 DD565's last week with replication and
> we ran into an issue. After working with the level 1 guy for about 30
> minutes (and he tried lots of things to troubleshoot in that time) he
> immedidately got a level 2 guy on who quickly resolved the issue. Most
> vendors will say "I'll have to call you back" and it may be the next day
> before you hear from them. Also the actual problem (request actually)
> changed about 4 times during the call and they did not once require that I
> open a separate for each question/request. Most companies want to different
> ticket number for each question just to inflate their support open/close
> numbers.
>
> In closing, DataDomain can also be used as a VTL (with FC) but my question
> would be "Why?"
>
> Sincerely,
>
> John Chaney <><
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Graeme Parker [mailto:graeme.parker AT GMAIL DOT COM]
> Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2007 11:32 AM
> Subject: Re: Data De-Duplication product info
>
> Hi Brett,
>
> We currently have approx 40TB worth of Data Domain in our envrionment
> based
> on 460's, 560's, and 510s. They work great and generally see an average
> of
> 10x compression. If you are backing up any Virtual Machines we have seen
> compression ratios as high as 135x. Mind you this is with the backup of
> the
> vm not being compressed before being dumped to the DD. Support from DD
> has
> been excellent and we will continue to grow our infrastructure over the
> next
> few years. Client side Dedup in software over a LAN just seems silly as it
> requires process cycles on the client side.. it might make sense when
> sending data over a WAN as you only send the deduped bytes. That being
> said.... we use DD boxes in each remote region so since we own the LAN
> there
> is no worries about bandwidth usage and the DD boxes replicate over the
> WAN
> to the same effect. Having a dedicated device that does dedup on the fly
> has worked great for us. The only issue we have with Legato is its
> ability
> to understand there are two sets of data somewhere that it didn't move
> itself (post replication).
>
> Graeme.
>
> On 11/1/07, Brett Monroe <mr.bmonroe AT gmail DOT com> wrote:
> >
> > Hey all,
> >
> > We are currently in the planning phase of dramatically transforming out
> > data
> > center's backup environment from the stone age (direct-attach tape
> drives
> > on
> > all servers doing fulls every night) to a more modern approach of
> > centralization. We are also looking to implement a data De-Duplication
> > device in the mix but the offerings seem...immature. I was wondering if
> > any
> > of you fine folks have any experience with any of de-duping technology
> > whether it's client based software (Avamar) or something that sits in
> > front
> > of a backup disk device (Data Domain, Diligent, etc). I'd be very
> > interested in hearing what your experiences have been.
> >
> > Thanks
> > --Brett
> >
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