Archive for the ‘Virtual Tape’ Category

The Demise of the NearStore VTL: A historical perspective

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

Rumors have been circulating for months about the demise of NetApp's VTL offering. Today, Beth Pariseau from SearchDataBackup published the first public confirmation that development on the product has ceased. It is not a surprise, but makes for an interesting case study. NetApp acquired VTL technology with their purchase of Alacritus for ...

Streaming LTO-5

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Chris Mellor (twitter:@Chris_Mellor) recently posted an article over at The Register about LTO-5 entitled Is LTO-5 the last harrah for tape?.  He makes an interesting point about the future of LTO and whether LTO-5 will be the last generation of the technology.  Most of the comments on the article disagree ...

When is a node not a node?

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

One of the things that irks me is when press/analysts/vendors compare a competitor’s solution to a one node SEPATON solution.  SEPATON’s VTL as well as our DeltaStor deduplication and DeltaRemote replication products rely on our DeltaScale™ architecture which is designed around the concept of grid scalability.  The grid allows us ...

War Stories: Diligent

Friday, May 1st, 2009

As I have posted before, IBM/Diligent requires Fibre Channel drives due to the highly I/O intensive nature of their deduplication algorithm. I recently came across a situation that provides an interesting lesson and an important data point for anyone considering IBM/Diligent technology. A customer was backing up about 25 TB ...

SEPATON Performance — Again

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

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 ...

Customer perspectives on SEPATON, IBM and Data Domain

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

SEPATON issued a press release on Monday that is worth mentioning here on the blog. SearchStorage also published a related article here. The release highlights MultiCare a SEPATON customer that uses DeltaStor deduplication software in a two-node VTL. In the release, the customer characterizes their testing of solutions from ...

Falconstor, SIR and OEMs

Friday, December 5th, 2008

This article on Byteandswitch.com highlights enhancements to FalconStor's SIR deduplication platform, but I have to wonder whether anyone cares. FalconStor was a big player in providing VTL software to OEMs; but their deduplication software has been largely ignored. FalconStor had their heyday in VTL. They aggressively pursued OEM deals ...

Choosing a Data Protection Solution in a Down Economy

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

I hate to turn on the TV these days because it is full of bad news. There always seems to be some pundit talking about troubles in the housing market, credit markets, automotive industry, consumer confidence and so many other areas. It does not take a rocket scientist ...

NetApp Dedupe: The Worst of Inline and Post-process Deduplication

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

NetApp finally entered the world of deduplication in data protection. While they have supported a flavor of the technology in their filers since May 2007, they have never launched the technology for their VTL. Why? Because their VTL does not use any of the core filer IP. ...

Data protection and natural disasters – Part 2

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

In part 1, I touched on four of the most common challenges with data restoration in a disaster scenario. In this post, I will review some other key considerations. These examples focus on the infrastructure required after a disaster has occurred. Related posts:Data protection and natural disasters – Part ...