OST is just the API extended to 3rd parties like Data Domain. Before OST, 
backing up to disk was a kludge. (along came the VTL which was really just a 
jury-rigged way of doing backups to disk)

OST allows 3rd party appliances do stuff like catalog aware replication (so 
that the data is traveling directly from one data domain to another data domain 
w/o going up thru a media server stack) There are a ton of features OST allows 
but not all vendors have adopted all features into their plug-in. The beauty of 
going mostly disk-backup is no longer the need to deal with media pools, 
scratch, media databases, etc.. your only working with images. Its such a 
breathe of fresh air.

One cool feature coming soon with the data domain plug-in is that you can do 
synthetic full backups.. I can write a backup to the OST appliance (which is 
deduped as its written). I can then use an SLP to do an optimized deduped 
replication of that backup to another OST appliance (ideally in a DR or remote 
data center). This basically creates a "copy 2" of your image much the same way 
a vault job duplicates images on physical tape. With synthetic fulls, I can 
construct a full backup from the fragments of full and incremental backups 
located on the remote OST appliance without needing any data from the source 
site. All of this is done w/o going thru a media server stack. Optimized 
deduped replication is the way to go.. I saw 100gb backups written to one data 
domain (which gets heavily deduped) and then only like 8gb of that actually 
needed to be replicated over the wire via SLP's when creating a remote copy of 
it. (because it pre-ships its dedupe fingerprints) Of course data ty
 pe is a big factor on what numbers you see but it worked well with everything 
I threw at it - Exchange, oracle, MSSQL, large NAS volumes, vmware esx 
datastores, etc...

I tested Data Domain and Quantum DXi extensively and both were pretty 
impressive. I also played around with using a hitachi SAN and creating media 
server dedupe pools but was not too impressed with this approach. (its 
basically old school pure disk and dedupe)

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