contentaware – About Restore

One of the hidden landmines of deduplication is its impact on restore performance. Most vendors gloss over this issue in their quest to sell bigger and faster systems. Credit goes to Scott from EMC who acknowledged that restore performance declines on deduplicated data in the DL3D. We have seen other similar solutions suffer restore performance degradation of greater than 60% over time. Remember, the whole point of backing up is to restore when/if necessary. If you are evaluating deduplication solutions, you must consider several questions.

What are the implications to your business on the decreasing restore performance?
What is it about deduplication technology that hurts restore performance?
Can you reduce the impact on restore performance?
Is there a solution that does not have this limitation?

DeltaStor Deduplication, cont….

Scott from EMC and author of the backup blog responded to my previous post on DeltaStor. First, thank you for welcoming me to the world of blogdom. This blog is brand new and it is always interesting to engage in educated debate.

I do not want this to go down a “mine is better than yours” route. That just becomes annoying and can lead to a fight that benefits no one. I am particularly concerned since Scott, judging by his picture on EMC’s site, looks much tougher than me! 🙂

The discussion really came down to a few points. For the sake of simplicity I will quote him directly.

So, putting hyperbole aside, the support situation (and just as importantly, the mandate to test every one of those configurations) is a pretty heavy burden.

DeltaStor takes a different approach to deduplication than hash-based solutions like EMC/Quantum and Data Domain. It requires SEPATON to do some additional testing for different applications and modules. The real question under debate is how much additional work. In his first post, Scott characterized this as being entirely unmanageable. (My words, not his.) I continue to disagree with this assessment. Like most things, the Pareto Principle applies here (Otherwise known as the 80-20 rule.). Will we support every possible combination of every application, maybe not. Will we support the applications and environments that our customers and prospects use? Absolutely.