Month: February 2009

Categories
Backup Deduplication Restore Uncategorized Virtual Tape

SEPATON Performance — Again

Scott from EMC has challenged SEPATON’s advertised performance for backup, deduplication, and restore. As industry analyst, W. Curtis Preston so succinctly put it, “do you really want to start a ‘we have better performance than you’ blog war with one of the products that has clustered dedupe?” However, I wanted to clarify the situation in this post.

Let me answer the questions specifically:

1. The performance data you refer to with the link in his post three words in is both four months old, and actually no data at all.

SEPATON customers want to know how much data they can backup and deduplicate in a given day. That is what is important in a real life usage of the product. The answer is 25 TB per day per node. If a customer has five nodes and a twenty-four hour day, that’s 125 TB of data backed up and deduplicated. This information has been true and accurate for four months and is still true today.

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Categories
General Marketing

W. Curtis Preston Now with TechTarget

About a week ago, Curtis posted on his blog that he is joining TechTarget as an Executive Editor which essentially means that he will continue to present at various events. He is still an independent consultant and can keep working on his other projects including his Mr. Backup Blog and BackupCentral.

In my opinion, this is a great outcome for both TechTarget and Curtis. The Backup/Deduplication schools will benefit from Curtis’s continued tenure as a featured speaker. He is an engaging presenter and provides a balanced perspective. It is also beneficial for Curtis because he is free to pursue his personal and business interests.

A big congratulations to both TechTarget and Curtis!

Categories
Deduplication

TSM Deduplication

IBM recently announced the addition of deduplication technology to their Tivoli Storage Manager (ITSM) backup application. ITSM is a powerful application that uses a progressive incremental approach to data protection that is completely different from most other backup applications. The addition of deduplication to ITSM provides a benefit in disk space utilization, but also creates some new challenges.

The first challenge for many TSM environments is that administrators are already over-burdened with having to manage numerous discrete processes to ensure that backup operations are meeting their business requirements. The deduplication functionality within ITSM adds another process to an already complex backup environment. In addition to scheduling and managing processes such as reclamation, migration and expiration as part of daily operations, administrators now have to manage deduplication as well. This management may involve activities as disparate as capacity planning, fine-tuning, and system optimization. The alternative is to use a VTL-based deduplication solution like a SEPATON® S2100®-ES2 VTL with DeltaStor® software, which will provide deduplication benefits without having to create and manage a new process.

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Categories
General

SEPATON Announcement

SEPATON recently announced fourth quarter results in this release. I am not going to repeat the content here, but wanted to highlight that the company had a record Q4 and achieved an important milestone.

I am excited about the prospects for SEPATON in 2009. Don’t get me wrong, 2009 is likely to be a tough year for all vendors, but those companies with compelling products and value propositions will fare better in these difficult times. SEPATON is uniquely positioned with our core focus on Scale-Out Deduplication™ for the enterprise.

Categories
Deduplication

IBM Deduplication Appliances

I have been on hiatus as of late and apologize for my tardiness in blogging.

IBM released their new deduplication applications based on the technology they acquired from Diligent. At first glance, it might appear that this could be a competitive alternative to SEPATON, but when you look at it, it quickly becomes apparent that this is not the case.

IBM previously sold one product, TS7650G gateway which they now target at the enterprise. The new appliance products use similar server hardware and a de-featured version of the DS4700 disk array. As with all Diligent installations, the solution uses Fibre Channel drives that reduce density and add cost. They will never be price leaders. The configurations are as follows:

Capacity Nodes
7 TB One
18 TB One
36 TB One
36 TB Two


You can’t move beyond the configurations listed above. If you want to grow the system beyond 36 TB, you are out of luck. Your only choice is a forklift upgrade to the TS7650G gateway. What if you want dual nodes and less than 36TB? Same answer. How about replication? Same answer. (That is, if you can consider the array-based approach in the TS7650G a realistic replication option.)

The ultimate irony is that by creating appliance VTLs, IBM has actually made their customers’ lives more difficult. Customers now have to choose whether to purchase a gateway (which adds complexity and cost) or a simple bounded appliance (which has limited configurations). Why should a customer have to make this trade-off? Why not offer an appliance that is simple, cost-effective AND scalable? Well, the simple answer to the question is to get a SEPATON S2100-ES2!