IBM Deduplication Appliances

10. Feb, 2009 0 Comments

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!