News

posted on 12 May 2008 08:24

By moving from dual to quad-core Xeons Data Domain has a new high-end DD690 product that dedupes data twice as fast. It is the industry's fastest inline deduplication system

The DD690 comes as a full array or as a storage-less gateway (DD690g) to which users add SAN storage. The deduplication engine now runs on two quad-core Xeon processors which gives it a throughput of up to 1.4TB/hour and it can single-stream up to 600GB/hour. The full DD690 array can exhibit a 22.4TB/hour performance. The addressable capacity is up to 48TB of SATA drives and the array can store up to 28PB of deduplicated data on its raw capacity of 768TB.

The product supports 10Gbit Ethernet cards, Data Domain saying it needs to be fed data fast to prevent being slowed down by waiting for data.

The identified inline deduplication competition is the IBM Diligent product, said to be about a third as fast per controller with the Diligent 1000E 4-socket server, and EMC's Avamar RAIN Grid, wchich is 17 times slower than the DD690. Data Domain points out that Diligent product has Fiber Channel drives and not less expensive SATA ones.

Data Domain says we can expect deduplication speed to double as the number of processor cores double. That being the case we can expect another doubling around 2011 when 8-core Xeons are slated to become available.

It also says that customers can achieve an up to 60:1 deduplication ratio across sites. The DD690 can support up to 60 downstream devices as a hub, i.e, Data Domain DD120 systems in branch offices.

Kevin Platz, European sales VP for Data Domain, said: "The speeds we're attaining open up new possibilities. We architected it for more than VTL (virtual tape libraries).  Dedupe is not just for VTL. We are a nearline target, an archive target. We look like a file system and we write pretty fast."

The DD60's speed is such that it can be used for all nearline storage applications, meaning all storage more focussed on capacity than performance. Data Domain says this includes remote office backup and DR, mid-range backup and DR, deduped nearline network-attached storage (NAS) and DR and also archival storage. The product works with NFS, CIFS, OST, NDMP via Ethernet, or VTL via Fiber Channel.

The DD690 will be available in the second quarter of this year through Data Domain's channel partners. It will be priced around $210,000 for a 16TB configuration.

[Chris Mellor, editor.]