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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.

2. Sepaton claims the same performance for deduplication on and off. Which is not realistic. They make no mention of what happens when you do both tasks (ingest and deduplication) simultaneously.

Our numbers are conservative and include ingest, deduplication and house-cleaning tasks. Backup is even faster than that. We use the 25TB per node per day as our metric so our customers get the bottom line information they need to make a sound business decision about how fast we can get their data backed up and deduplicated. They don’t care if it backs up slightly faster than that.

As for dedupe off—a SEPATON VTL with 16 nodes can backup at 34.5 TB per HOUR.

3. Just like TSM deduplication. Coming soon.

TSM deduplication is GA.

4. They do have an issue restoring from deduplicated data, they just don’t want to discuss it.

Not sure where you get this information. We use a process called forward referencing so our restore speed from deduplicated data is the fastest in the industry. We store the most current data in full and deduplicate older data with pointers forward in time to it. The processing load of restoring day-old or weeks-old data is miniscule. Think about it, the newer the data, the less reconstitution necessary. Just the opposite of the EMC solution. In fact, data would have to be ready for cold storage (six months) before it was old enough to slow a SEPATON VTL down to EMC’s restore speed. Even then, it would likely be faster.

5. We have the ability to size how big the cached data pool is.

You highlight that EMC’s restore performance from the deduplication repository is a whopping 75% slower than ingest. The DL3D has the ability to size the cached data pool because it needs a cached data pool. SEPATON doesn’t. We restore as fast as we back up. Period. If the data is months old, we restore it nearly as fast as we backed it up. The slow down is smaller than a rounding error.

4 replies on “SEPATON Performance — Again”

I get it. When he said “just like TSM deduplication,” he meant you deduping TSM data, not dedupe IN TSM.

I did notice that you did not reply to the part of his post where he asked about replication. Did you think we wouldn’t notice? 😉 It is a major area of weakness for your product.

Can you comment on when the following two long-awaited features will be GA?

1. Delta Remote (deduped replication)
2. Dedupe of NetWorker data

Curtis,

Let me respond directly to each of your points.

TSM Deduplication
I may not have been clear in my post regarding TSM deduplication and so let me restate: DeltaStor support for TSM is GA.

Futures
It is my policy not to comment on unannounced products and so I purposely did not speak to replication and will not address your latest request for NetWorker GA dates. However, I can say that you should look for an announcement from us in the next couple of months.

If you would like to sign an NDA with us, I would be happy to provide more details. 🙂

JL;

In the prior post you wrote that: “The newest backups will always provide the fastest performance.” This implies that older stuff restores at a slower rate. You directly contradict that in this post. So that was the reason for my observation. If you are now stating that, unequivocally, restore speed is not impacted by age of backup being restored, then great! But that is not consistent with your prior statements.

Secondly, it is great that TSM Delta Stor is shipping now. From what customers tell me, it was about 18 months late. So a bit of a cheap shot. Well, a lot of a cheap shot. But true nevertheless.

Thanks for clearing things up.

I don’t see where he contradicts himself. He’s saying newer stuff restores faster, but that the difference between yesterday and a week ago is “miniscule.” He also says that the difference between yesterday and six months ago is more substantial. That’s not a contradiction AFAICS.

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