Managing and storing information effectively is at the core of every business. While storage volumes soar, experts in deduplication technology propose an approach that allows companies to reduce dramatically their Data Domain has just upgraded its New Platform Operating system to improve the speed of deduplication by delivering new levels of performance.

(photo: Shane Jackson, Senior Director of Product Marketing and Channel Marketing)

“With this deduplication process breakthrough, we can accelerate the performance between 15% to 100%”, says Shane Jackson, Senior Director of Product Marketing and Channel Marketing. Users can reduce backup windows and benefit from faster time-to-DR synch when replicating. The new Data Domain operating system software, DD OS 4.6, is available now at no extra charge to existing Data Domain users with standard system support agreements.

Compared to its competitors, Data Domain proposes an in-line instead of a post-process deduplication. “This way, data is deduplicated before it is written on the disk, says Shane Jackson. It is faster, asks for less disk space and you don’t have to wait until the post-processing is over.” Beside the reduction of complexity, this solution relies on a CPU-centric design that aims at avoiding disk-based bottlenecks and thus ensuring a faster system. At the same time, the performance is also improved thanks to the use of multi-core CPUs.

According to Data Domain, “while performance can increase on all systems across all protocols, large data centers using Data Domain’s flagship DD690 system with Veritas NetBackup OpenStorage (OST) by Symantec and 10 Gb Ethernet, can now support accelerated backup throughput of up to 750 MB/s, or 2.7 TB / hour. This is approximately 90% faster than the DD690’s best throughput when introduced in May 2008. This new benchmark was established with the minimum DD690 configuration of 2 disk shelves and benefits from extra tuning and parallelism possible with this combination of fabric and software”. (www.datadomain.com)

Data Domain’s was the first solution to build on the potential of OpenStorage, an API of Symantec. According to Shane Jackson, “this tightly integrates with the back-up system, giving more control to managers and allowing load balancing on servers and the replication of data”.