The DeltaStor Datasheet
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These documents now highlight per node deduplication performance of 25 TB per node per day.

Happy New Year!

Storage is one of the best publications focused on the storage and data protection industry. The periodical contains high quality commentary from numerous industry pundits and provides an opportunity to advertise in print to a targeted audience. Personally, I think that it provided strong value on both fronts.

Those from Tech Target will argue that the content will still be available on the Web, a media that is more in line with their reader requirements. I disagree, I find strong value in physical print. The ability to take the magazine with me and read it on a plane or during a moment of downtime is valuable and that experience is not duplicated on the web. Yes, I have a “smart phone”, but the experience is still is not the same. Additionally, I believe that advertising in a physical magazine is very different from advertising on the Web. Sadly the print option is no longer available.

In short, these are tough times in the economy and I am saddened that the printed Storage has been canned. It was a great publication and its value (at least to me) will decline when it goes web-only. Of course, Tech Target needs to manage its own business and this was a business decision, , Personally, I think that it is a mistake.

Diligent’s technology requires Fibre Channel (FC) drives for the best performance because pattern matching is highly I/O intensive and needs the additional I/O from FC drives. FC drives in turn, negatively affect disk density, require more power and dramatically increase the price of the system.

The pattern matching technology used in the TS7650G is an inline process. Therefore, all duplicate data has to be identified before data is committed to disk. Pattern matching only provides an approximate match on redundant data and requires a byte-level compare to verify the redundancy. All byte-level compares must be completed before any data is written to disk and the next piece of data accepted. FC drives are required because they provide the random I/O performance needed to handle inline byte-level comparisons. Diligent specified a 110 disk FC array for the ESG performance whitepaper that they sponsored back in July of 2006. This is not to say that the algorithm will not work with SATA, but these drives will dramatically reduce performance.

If you are considering the TS7650G, you must carefully consider the associated disk sub-system. It is not clear what disk system and capacity was used when IBM/Diligent generated their performance specifications. As part of the evaluation you should also test single stream and aggregate backup performance because as previously mentioned single stream performance may be a challenge.

FalconStor had their heyday in VTL. They aggressively pursued OEM deals with large vendors including EMC, IBM, and Sun. EMC was the most successful with their EDL family of products. As the market moved to deduplication, you would think that FalconStor would be the default OEM supplier of deduplication software as well. You would be wrong.

Ironically, FalconStor’s VTL success was their downfall in deduplication. Their OEMs realized that they were all selling the same VTL software and did not want to repeat the situation with deduplication.  EMC and IBM, have already announced that they are using alternative deduplication providers.

EMC (26% of FalconStor revenue in 2007) partnered with Quantum.  They now sell VTL appliances based exclusively on Quantum deduplication technology, the Rube Goldberg DL3D 4000 for those still wanting to use the FalconStor with Quantum deduplication, and the non-deduplication enabled EDL. EMC has the challenging task of differentiating each solution and supporting the disparate products. FalconStor will be impacted by EMC’s partnership, and if EMC’s DL3D solutions take off, the impact could be substantial.

IBM decided to take the M&A route and purchased Diligent. Unlike EMC, who at least tried to create a migration path to deduplication with the DL3D 4000, there is no option with IBM.  Existing TS75xx VTLs will have to be forklift upgraded to the new TS7650G which is a complex and costly process. This defection by another OEM is another blow to FalconStor and SIR.

In summary, two out of the three major  FalconStor OEMs are looking elsewhere for deduplication.  The third OEM, Sun, announced a partnership with Diligent in 2007 although it appears that Sun has now focused on FalconStor exclusively. It still remains unclear who is actually selling or buying this stuff. Clearly not IBM or EMC and we rarely see Sun. I have not had a request for a competitive update on FalconStor or Sun for over a year. We compete with almost everyone at different times and it is very odd that SIR is never mentioned. It makes you wonder whether there is something else going on here causing the OEM defections.

In short, it appears that FalconStor’s position in OEM marketings is eroding and ironically, this is attributable to their previous success in VTL software.  FalconStor a difficult task of rebuilding their OEM business in a down economy.

In these difficult times, companies must focus on their bottom line. Every technology purchase will be scrutinized and the payback must be clearly quantified. As I posted previously, ROI is vital.

The good news for data protection companies is that data volumes do not go down in a recession and retention times do not shorten. The current difficulties in the financial sector suggest that we may see even stricter regulations and longer retentions. Deduplication-enabled solutions can still thrive in this environment because they provide compelling value. They reduce backup administration time and cost  while dramatically lowering acquisition cost. However, remember that not all systems are alike and you must consider future performance and capacity requirements. Adding multiple independent systems will negatively impact ROI. The result is that scalable deduplication solutions like those sold by SEPATON can provide strong ROIs and thus can weather the storm of a tough economy better than other technologies with weaker value propositions.

Recently, an independent market research firm who reviews the purchasing trends of companies of all sizes told us that their research indicates that companies over-purchased primary storage in the first half of 2008 and that the outlook for this sector was gloomy. In contrast, deduplication technology was the one bright spot. So far our experience has suggested that their analysis is accurate.

A difficult economy is a test of everyone’s staying power. Companies are scrutinizing every purchase and focus only on those technologies that provide truly compelling value. Deduplication enabled solutions are fortunate because of the value they bring. This is not to say that these technologies are immune, but rather that they will fare better than most.

1. That the Somali pirates have not hijacked SEPATON although Bloomberg suggests in a humorous press release that Citibank may be in their sights.
2. That the backup guy is no longer treated like an ugly step child and locked in the tape silo when naughty.
3. That data retention requirements are likely to get even stricter thanks to our friends on Wall Street.
4. I have a job.
5. My job is not selling Rube Goldberg contraptions.
6. Data Domain has spent millions educating the market on why dedupe matters but only offers solutions for SMBs.
7. That all those cubicle gophers are still jacking up their company’s capacity requirements by downloading, sharing and storing all of their personal MP3s, videos and photos.
8. That gas prices have declined so I no longer have to skateboard to work.
9. Our VTL is so easy to install and operate that a consultant with no SEPATON experience set it up and got it running in 15 minutes.
10. That the loud CS guy who sat across from me was relocated to the broom closet.

Feel free to post what you are thankful for in the comments. Have a great Thanksgiving.

In situations like these, IT departments must go back to the basics. Purchases must be all about ROI. You must look beyond just acquisition cost and consider how a given solution can save your organization money both upon acquisition and into the future.

The interesting thing about ROI is that there are many components that should be considered. Look at both capital expenditures and operational expenditures over time. This reveals an interesting irony. Tape may have a low acquisition cost, but a much higher on an operating cost. Tape will also cost you in annual capex when need to scale it. You may save money when purchasing it and yet find it very expensive to operate over the long run.

When thinking about costs, some of the key metrics you should consider include:

Cost of system management
Consider the inherent complexity and manual labor required to manage a given system. If one system meets your needs today, what will your environment look like in one, two or five years and what will be the resulting impact on your operational costs? There is an added cost for managing and implementing multiple systems versus a single system; you need to decide on the amount. A single highly scalable solution can help with this cost.

Cost of data center space
The high cost of data center space may make adding systems cost prohibitive. You need to get the best utilization out of existing space and must consider system footprint. Clearly deduplication can help here and the more you can reduce your capacity requirements, the better off you are. Server virtualization can also help since you can have multiple virtual servers in the footprint of one physical server.

Power and cooling cost
As the prices of natural resources have increased so has the price of electricity. You need to find ways to leverage your existing electrical and cooling infrastructure more efficiently. Deduplication can help with this since you can use it to reduce your system footprints. Server virtualization can also help by reducing the number of servers and related power and cooling requirements.

Maintenance cost
Many vendors include this in the purchase price. However, at some point, you will need to renew maintenance. Beware of vendors that charge dramatically higher rates for maintenance renewals and uses this as leverage to sell a new system. In other cases, technology becomes so obsolete that it is unsupportable. In these cases, you need to think about a solution that provides backward compatibility so as new product features and components come out, they can be integrated into the existing system without a forklift upgrade. (e.g. transparently move from 2 Gb to 4 Gb FC, non-dupe to dedupe enabled or from one drive size to another..)

All of these metrics must be considered when building an ROI on the solution. Compelling ROI data will allow you to build a case for upgrading your infrastructure that is financially justified. Prior to today’s difficult times, ROI justification was important, but since the economic difficulties, it has become vital.

Our performance is quite simple to understand. We use a grid architecture which means that all nodes can see all storage and can access the same deduplication repository; you can backup and restore from any node. Today we support five nodes with DeltaStor while the VTL supports 16. We will be adding support for larger node counts in the near future. Each node provides an additional 2.2 TB/hr ingest and 25 TB/day deduplication performance. The appliance deduplicates data concurrently that means that backups and dedupe occur simultaneously with no performance impact. Let’s look at the actual numbers.

Backup Speed

Restore Speed

* Forward referencing enables us to provide this restore performance on deduplicated data. The newest backups will always provide the fastest performance.

Deduplication Speed

A few additional points to consider:

• Our single stream performance is based on individual ports. Thus we can ingest at 1 TB/hr single stream per port; if you have 10 ports, you can have 10 simultaneous 1 TB/hr streams.
• We do not need a separate “garbage collection” process as required by most other solutions. This process is included in our performance metrics. Most vendors require a separate process and exclude its impact when providing performance metrics.
• The S2100-ES2 includes hardware compression on both deduplicated and non-deduplicated which reduces footprint by about 2:1. Most other vendors either use software compression or use hardware compression selectively. (e.g. on the deduplication repository only.)
• The 5 node system can address environments with 100 + TB in one system image and deduplication repository. Protecting the same environment with competing solutions will require multiple independent systems.

An EMC blogger recently posted on this topic and provided insights on the reduction in restore performance he sees from both the DL3D and Data Doman.  He said, “I will have to rely on what customers tell me: data reads from a DD [Data Domain] system are typically 25-33% of the speed of data writes.” He then goes on to confirm that “…the DL3D performs very similarly to a Data Domain box”. He is referring to restore performance on deduplicated data in reverse referenced environment. (Both Data Domain and EMC/Quantum rely on reverse referencing.) He recommends that you maintain a cache of undeduplicated on the DL3D to avoid this penalty. Of course, this brings up a range of additional questions such as how much extra storage will the holding area require, how many days should you retain and what does this do to deduplication ratios?

The simplest solution to the above problem is to use forward referencing, but neither DD nor EMC/Quantum support this technology. EMC’s workaround is to force the customer to use more disk to store undeduplicated data which adds to the management burden and cost.

This reminds me of a classic quote from John “Hannibal” Smith from the A-Team:

I love it when a plan comes together!

What more confirmation do you need?

Modern tape drives use a linear technology where the tape head is stationary and the tape moves at high speed above it. Through each generation of LTO, the tape speed is largely unchanged while tape density doubles. At the same time, LTO drives have not expanded their ability to vary the speed of tape. Thus if you go from LTO-3 to LTO-4, you have doubled the density of your tape and you must double the throughput of data handled by the drive to keep tape speed unchanged. Why does tape speed matter? Because LTO tapes have a limited ability to throttle tape speeds, your performance will suffer terribly if you cannot meet the drives minimum streaming requirement.

If you are unable to stream enough data to your tape drives as mentioned above, the tape drive will go into a condition called “shoe shining” where it is constantly stopping and starting. It will try to stop when its buffer empties, but the tape is moving so fast that it will overshoot its stopping point and need to slowly stop, rewind to where it stopped writing and begin writing again. The tape moves forward and backward like shoe shine cloth. This process causes a massive reduction in performance and excessive wear on the tape drives and media. The table below comes from a Quantum whitepaper entitled “When to Choose LTO-3″ and highlights the real world performance requirements of LTO-2 and LTO-3. I have estimated LTO-4 requirements for completeness.

Click for larger image

Note how the minimum usable performance approximately doubles with each tape generation. As you upgrade tape technology, the challenge of streaming becomes greater and greater. Clearly, if you can stream LTO-3 there is no guarantee that you will be able to stream LTO-4. The ultimate irony is that upgrading to the latest tape technology often reduces not improves backup performance.

The only way to gain the benefit of the new technology is to thoroughly review and perhaps even re-architect your backup environment for the new drives. This creates a substantial hidden cost. Bringing in a disk-based backup target can often simplify the upgrade process.

Disk-based backup provide tremendous benefits in tape environments. They act as a variable speed backup target and will accept data at any rate you can send it. This frees you from the challenge in the tape world of maintaining a minimum throughput. Additionally, a VTL solution like the SEPATON S2100-ES2 provides very fast performance and can stream to LTO-4 drives and eliminate shoe shining if tape copies are required. You can often reduce the re-architecture costs associated with a tape upgrade by including a disk-based backup solution. Additionally, you can also reduce the amount of tape hardware required since the VTL will become the primary backup target of your nightly backups and you only need enough tape hardware to complete the tape copy process, if required, within your window.