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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...