Pondering Fibre Channel over Ethernet

Friday, September 25th, 2009

Currently the twittersphere and bloggosphere is actively discussing Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).  The conversation was triggered by a post by Hu Yoshida from HDS, and I wanted to share my thoughts. One of the most interesting responses was this one by Nigel Poulton where he explains the infrastructure required for ...

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 ...

Data Domain Announcement

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

Data Domain recently announced that their new OS release dramatically improved appliance performance. On the surface, the announcement seems compelling, but upon further review, it creates a number of questions. Performance Improvement Deduplication software such as Data Domain’s is complex and can contain hundreds of thousands of interrelated lines of code. ...

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 ...

SEPATON Performance Revisited

Monday, January 5th, 2009

In this post, I highlighted SEPATON's S2100-ES2 performance both with and without deduplication enabled. In a comment, I had also indicated that we would be adding additional performance information to our website and collateral and  am happy to report that the update is complete.  You can find our deduplication ...

SEPATON S2100-ES2 Performance

Friday, November 14th, 2008

The SEPATON S2100-ES2 was designed for speed. Our solution is based around the concept of a unified appliance which provides one GUI for managing and monitoring all embedded hardware. We also automate the disk provisioning and configuration to provide consistent scalability and performance. The result is an ...

InformationWeek on NEC HYDRAstor

Friday, September 12th, 2008

Howard Marks recently posted an interesting article about NEC’s HYDRAstor over on his blog at InformationWeek. He discusses the product and how the device is targeted at backup and archiving applications. He makes some interesting points and mentions SEPATON. I wanted to respond to some of the ...