Ritual of the Habitual

It took less than 24 hours. Less than 1 day for somebody to point out that my claims in the previous post didn't seem to be true. Chris Mellor, bless his heart, claims that the Data Domain 690 with 16 controllers, offers 5 times the capacity and just over 3 times the performance of the DL3D 3000.

But lets just take a step back here, and admit what is really going on. First off, if you want to buy 16 controllers from Data Domain, you need to buy a DDX. Sort of. Or you could just buy 16 DD690s. And the difference between buying 16 690s, installing them in 16 racks, and mounting them to your backup server as 16 targets (either CIFS/NFS or VTL)? Absolutely nothing. A big, fat zero.

Because what capabilities does the DDX add to 16 stand-alone 690s? Nothing. Nada. Zip.

For the DDX is a parlor trick. An illusion conjured up by the marketing folks. Just like Eisenheim, its not really there.

The DDX is a single part number for 16 entirely separate systems. There is no clustering. No shared anything. No failover. No common components. So to claim that a DDX offers 5 times the capacity and 3 times the performance of a 3D 3000 is exactly equal to saying that it takes Data Domain 16 systems to beat our performance and capacity.

OK.

Seems to me like that sort of bluster is a sign of insecurity.

If I wanted to match Data Domain in their insecurity, I would propose the following. EMC should introduce a new deduplication appliance. It will take less than a day to develop, test, and build (because I am really just creating a part number and a brochure, not a cluster). I am going to call it the DL4D 5000. It is comprised of 16 DL3D 4000s. It offers 35 TB/s throughput (yes, you read that right). It offers 10 PB of standard capacity, and 48 PB of deduplicated capacity. Pretty impressive huh?

But I am not that insecure.

Set aside the bluster. Compare a 690 to a 3000.  My claim stands: EMC offers better performance, and more than 3 times the capacity of the best available Data Domain system.

(Truthfully, it is actually better than that: the DD690 offers only 48 TB of raw capacity--with RAID that will diminish to less than 40 TB of useable space. The 148 TB in the DL3D 3000 is a real, useable capacity. After RAID, sparing, and so on.)

Comments

[Chris Mellor]

Terrific reply. You set me right. Great stuff. A single DD690 has less capacity and is slower than a DL3D 4400, ditto the DL3D 3000. The piece I wrote will get altered.