The Backup Blog

Scaling Up and Out: The New Data Domain DD890 and GDA

Today EMC introduced the industry's fastest deduplication storage systems. And they are fast. Big and fast. Impressively so, and even more impressively if you have been involved with backup systems for a while—in a "look how far we have come" sort of way.  

But to focus on just the speed and scale would be to miss a lot of great functionality that our engineering teams have worked very hard to include in the latest software and hardware release of the Data Domain systems. In fact, this may be one of the biggest releases ever for new functionality and new capability with the release of Data Domain Operation System (DDOS) 5.0.   

Data Domain Archiving

Today is a big day. Today something different happened—it is not all just about bigger, better, faster (although there is some of that too, just see my other post!). 

Today is the day that EMC is introducing the industry's first disk based long term retention system for backup and archive data: the Data Domain Archiver.

The DD Archiver is a fundamentally different type of Data Domain product. The DD Archiver is a product designed for very long term retention of backup data. Something that, up to this point, has been the more or less exclusive province of tape. Tape has owned this market, relatively unchallenged, for one big reason: economics. 

Due almost entirely to reasons of cost, disk has been utilized primarily for storing data with shorter retention periods. I alluded to this in an earlier post: disk with a VTL interface and without deduplication would typically store data for a week or so. Disk with deduplication can economically extend that retention period from a single week to a few weeks or months. But for longer term retentions, tape has continued to be the primary media choice.

The Data Domain Archiver will change that.

Reducing Complexity With Data Protection Advisor

Do you feel nostalgia for the way backup used to be?

I know I do. Although this is very much a double edged sword.

I feel nostalgia for the simplicity that I thought backup should have, when I first started doing backup (almost 20 years ago now). I remember thinking that all you have to do is getting the data from the client to the server. Easy, right? Especially because you have a backup application to mediate the process.

I feel nostalgia for the the architecture. It was simple. Concise. There were backup clients, and backup servers. And tape drives, and tape. But there weren’t a lot of three-tier applications with media servers, or SAN media servers, or LAN free clients or dedicated storage nodes.

I feel nostalgia for the the simplicity of the protocols. If you wanted a tape drive, you chose SCSI. Because that was your only choice.

The Cost of Disk and Tape for Backup

I was doing a presentation last week and happened to be discussing the benefits of deduplication on disk with a group of customers. I made the comment at one point that if you are a C-level executive who doesn't know a lot about backup, and probably doesn't care a lot about the technical aspects of backup, there are a couple things that make it easy to understand why backup to disk with deduplication is such a good thing.

The first is that you can take a data centre floor full of tape and stick all that data on a couple racks worth of disk. Take 12,000 tapes and put all that data on less than 400 disk drives. Literally conslidating some 800 square feet of infrastructure into 10 or 20 square feet. That is an easy visual I think--and what that speaks to the level of consolidation that is possible. Much like server consolidation, this approach can offer some truly dramatic savings in space consumption.