TSM and Deduplication: 4 Reasons Why TSM Deduplication Ratios Suffer

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

TSM presents unique deduplication challenges due to its progressive incremental backup strategy and architectural design. This contrasts with the traditional full/incremental model used by competing backup software vendors. The result is that TSM users will see smaller deduplication ratios than their counterparts using NetBackup, NetWorker or Data Protector. This post ...

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 ...

TSM Deduplication

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

IBM recently announced the addition of deduplication technology to their Tivoli Storage Manager (ITSM) backup application. ITSM is a powerful application that uses a progressive incremental approach to data protection that is completely different from most other backup applications. The addition of deduplication to ITSM provides a benefit ...

IBM Deduplication Appliances

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

I have been on hiatus as of late and apologize for my tardiness in blogging. IBM released their new deduplication applications based on the technology they acquired from Diligent. At first glance, it might appear that this could be a competitive alternative to SEPATON, but when you look at it, ...

TS7650G and Fibre Channel Drives

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

IBM/Diligent TS7650G uses a pattern matching approach to deduplication, which is different from the hash-based solutions used by many vendors or the ContentAwareTM approach pioneered by SEPATON. 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 ...

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 ...

IBM Storage Announcement

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

As previously posted, I was confused about the muted launch of IBM’s XIV disk platform. Well, the formal launch finally occurred at IBM Storage Symposium in Montpelier, France. Congratulations to IBM, although I am still left scratching my head why they informally announced the product a month ago! Another ...

A little bit off topic – IBM XIV

Monday, August 25th, 2008

I traditionally stay focused on data protection in this blog, but wanted to make a quick digression. Specifically, I wanted to comment briefly on some weirdness around IBM and their XIV product line. IBM has recently been positioning XIV storage inside their new deduplication enabled VTL. Anyone ...