For those of you unfamiliar, Twitter is a micro-blogging application with posts of 140 words or less. It is a great forum for discussion and interaction with others in the industry. I particularly enjoy the real-time updates from various analysts and members of the press. You can view my profile here and see my posts in my new sidebar widget.
I am curious about Twitter usage and created the small survey below.
 Loading ... |
One of the questions I often get asked is “how do your products compare to Data Domain’s?” In my opinion, we really don’t compare because we play in different market segments. Data Domain’s strength is in the low-end of the market, think SMB/SME while SEPATON plays in the enterprise segment. These two segments have very different needs, which are reflected in the fundamentally different architectures of the SEPATON and Data Domain products. Here are some of the key differences to consider.
W. Curtis Preston recently wrote an article on the state of physical tape for SearchDataBackup. He talks about the technologies that backup software vendors have created technology to more effectively stream tape drives. As I posted before, if you cannot stream your tape drives, their performance will decline dramatically.
In enterprise environments, performance is the key driver of data protection. You must ensure that you can backup and recover massive amounts of data in prescribed windows, and tape’s inconsistent performance and complex manageability makes it difficult as a primary backup target. This fact can also make tape a challenging solution in small environments.
The problem with tape drive streaming is a common one and Preston agrees that it is the key reason for adopting disk-based backup technologies. Our customers typically see a dramatic improvement in performance with SEPATON’s VTL solutions since they are no longer limited by the streaming requirements of tape.
Even with new disk and deduplication technologies, most customers are still using tape today and will do so into the future. However, tape will likely be used more for archiving than for secondary storage. Deduplication enables longer retention, but most customers are probably not going to retain more than a year online. Tape is a good medium for deep archive where you store data for years, but is complex and costly as a target for enterprise backup.