Quantum 2010 Aug 30 announcement of their new DXi6700 Deduplicating VTL

Aug 302010

New Quantum DXi6700 Deduplicating VTL

Quantum recently announced a new deduplication appliance, the DXi6700, that supports FC VTL services aimed at the mid-range market.

DXi6700 Deduplication system

Quantum has leveraged the latest Nehalum Intel processor to produce the DXi6700. The DXi6700 supports up to 3.5 TB/hr of data throughput using parallel deduplication processing which as you may recall buffers data on disk and then begins deduplicating the stream in parallel with ingest. The new system is customer scalable from 24 to 56 TB usable and has 4-8GFC ports, two for host and two for backend tape connections. DXi6700 follows on the success of the previous DXi6500 NAS/OST deduplication system but supports the FC/VTL protocol.

From a spec sheet comparison perspective, the DXi is just a skosh slower than the latest EMC DataDomain DD670 in VTL mode (3.5TB/hr for DXi vs. 3.6TB/hr for DD670), with similar user capacity (both at 56TB usable). Quantum provided a price comparison at 32TB useable that showed the EMC’s DD670 VTL was 55% more expensive than the DXi6700 – but remember VTL is a separately chargeable option on EMC DataDomain products.

In addition, the DXi6700 system is one of the only deduplication systems that supports a direct path to tape (PTT) feature that can be managed via backup software (NetBackup, Backup Exec, Networker, Oracle Secure Backup, and Atempo). In this mode the backup software catalogues the data on both the virtual cartridge and physical tape. Using direct PTT, the customer benefits from the backup performance of deduplicated disk storage with the long-term economics of tape – the best of both worlds. The data is reconstituted (un-deduplicated) before copying to tape but can be compressed and encrypted by the tape system to reduce footprint and secure data-at-rest. Quantum also offers tape transports and libraries to complement their DXi systems.

DXi6700 also bundles all its software functionality in the base system price that includes PTT, deduplication, replication, and DXi advanced reporting. This way it’s ready to support replication whenever you need it. Plus, the DXi is configured using the same Quantum Vision software, which manages the rest of their product line so you can configure and report on both the tape and DXi sides from the same pane of glass.

Announcement significance

Quantum has had great success with the DXi6500 as a midrange solution focused on one standard interface (NAS/OST). With the DXi6700 addressing FC/VTL customers with a simple to use product that can be easily pushed through channel/business partners, I am sure they will find more success here as well.

A PDF version of this can be found at

Quantum 2010 Aug 30 releases the new DXi6700 Deduplication Appliance (PDF 178.1 KiB)

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community..

IBM 2010 Jul 20 announcement of their new TS7610 ProtecTIER

Jul 202010

Announcing IBM TS7610 ProtecTIER

Deduplication Appliance Express

IBM recently announced a new low-end version of their ProtecTIER® deduplication appliance focused on their mid-market customers.

TS7610 ProtecTIER Appliance Express

IBM is moving down market with this latest addition to their ProtecTIER Deduplication family of products. The TS7610 starts out with a minimum of 4TB usable capacity this is after RAID and other overhead within the appliance but can be expanded to 5.4TB and compares favorably in cost-performance against leading competitive products. The capacity upgrade is field license-able and does not require any additional storage to be installed.

Further, any ProtectTIER user storage capacity would be multiplied by whatever deduplication ratio one achieves with the product. For example if a workload were to attain a 20:1 deduplication ratio then 4TB usable would represent 80TB of customer data.

From a hardware perspective, the TS7610 comes in a 3U rack mounted enclosure holding 12-1TB SATA drives using RAID 6 protection with a Quad core 2.33 GHz Intel XEON processor and supports up to 80MB/second or more inline deduplication performance. Recall that inline deduplication doesn’t temporarily store duplicate data, like some competitive offerings do, it performs deduplication in real time as the data is received.

Other previously available members of the ProtecTIER family include:

TS7650 ProtecTIER appliance that supports from 7 to 36 TB of usable capacity with up to 500 MB/s or more throughput
TS7650G ProtecTIER Gateway that supports up to 1 PB of general purpose FC attached storage with 1000 MB/s of throughput in a clustered, high-availability configuration.
TS7680 ProtecTIER Gateway for z/OS combines a virtual tape library solution, inline data deduplication and disk-based storage options to provide users an optimal disk-based target for System z applications that traditionally use tape.

All ProtecTIER appliances support FC VTL interfaces and the TS7610 incorporates the same ProtecTIER technology as the other members of the family only in a plug-n-play, channel ready package.

For example, ProtecTIER deduplication technology does not use a hashing algorithm to determine if data is a duplicate but instead performs a bit-for-bit comparison to determine if data is unique or not. This unique and patented deduplication technology was designed to provide 100% data integrity and can never lose data through hash collisions.

Also, ProtecTIER many-to-one replication was previously released and can now be used with the TS7610, TS7650 Gateway and Appliances to support remote office environments that wish to replicate backup data to a central site. A remote office TS7610 can be easily setup with an IP address and power at the remote site and once booted, the rest of the configuration can be all handled by the central site.

Announcement significance

It seems most of ProtecTIER’s competition is trying to move up market while IBM is moving down. IBM has had and will continue to have a lot of success with large enterprises buying ProtecTIER solutions but needed something they could offer to medium sized organizations through the IBM Business Partner community. The TS7610 looks like it will fit the bill nicely.

A PDF version of this can be found at

IBM 2010 July 20 Announcement of new TS7610 ProtecTIER appliance (PDF 275.2 KiB)

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community

EMC 2010 Jul 20 BRS announcements – DD670 and DLm960 Deduplication Option

Jul 202010

New EMC BRS announcements – DD670 and DLm960 Deduplication Option

EMC® recently announced a new Data Domain appliance, the DD670, and a new deduplication option for their Disk Library for mainframe (DLm 960).

Data Domain DD670

EMC has leveraged the latest quad-core Intel processor to produce the DD670, a new midrange deduplication appliance. The DD670 now supports up to 5.4 TB/hr of aggregate throughput using the new EMC DD Boost software option (previously discussed[1]). The new system also has more than twice the maximum capacity of the closest previous Data Domain midrange appliance. The DD670 scales from 12 TB to 76 TB raw capacity (8.2 TB to 56 TB usable capacity) supporting 1 or 2TB SATA external disks. As for front-end interfaces, the DD670 includes three I/O slots that can support up to six 10 Gb Ethernet ports for IP connectivity or up to four 8 Gb fibre channel ports for VTL connectivity. The system also supports simultaneous use of Ethernet and fibre channel connectivity.

The entry level DD670 includes 12-1TB disk drives in a rack-mountable server and can be extended up to 76 TB of raw capacity with 2 – 32 TB storage expansion packs, each with 16 – 2 TB SATA disks. The new 2TB drive expansion shelf option will also be available for the Data Domain Global Deduplication Array and the DD880 appliance.

EMC provided performance comparisons that showed that the DD670 (using the custom DD Boost data access method) had over twice the maximum aggregate performance of its nearest competitor (using standard NFS). Likewise, in FC VTL mode, the DD670 had ~50% better performance than its nearest competitor.

Deduplication for mainframes with the Deduplication Storage Expansion Option for the DLm960

EMC also announced a new deduplication option for the DLm960. The Deduplication Storage Expansion option adds a Data Domain DD880 system as an additional storage repository alongside the current Celerra NS960. Recall that the DLm960 is a virtual tape library and has virtual tape engines that support hardware compression. With the new Deduplication Storage Expansion option, one can now designate via policy whether a virtual tape volume will be stored on the current NS960 or be deduplicated by going to the new DD880 repository.

Virtual tape volumes going to the DD880 are not compressed by the Virtual Tape Engines but will fully utilize the standard Data Domain compression and deduplication capabilities. Also, Data Domain replication facilities can be used in combination with Celerra replication to mirror DLm960 Celerra tape volume repositories and Deduplication Storage Expansion option data to an alternate site.

Historically, mainframes have used tapes as both a temporary repository for large datasets and a semi-permanent repository for backup data. In the first case, deduplication may not be as useful a strategy as this data does not have much redundancy or duplication. But when mainframe tapes are used for backup data then deduplication technology can be just as effective here as it is for open systems.

Announcement significance

EMC rolling Data Domain deduplication out to the mainframe space is not surprising. However, the fact that they elected to have separate/distinct storage repositories for tape data both with and without deduplication shows an appreciation for mainframe tape usage.

The new DD670 is a good addition to the middle of the Data Domain appliance space. We prefer seeing comparisons of the native FC/VTL performance, as there are few systems that natively support OST with deduplication and only Data Domain has the new DD Boost functionality. Therefore, a performance comparison of FC/VTL performance is more of an apples-to-apples comparison of performance. EMC has been promoting the performance advantages of its SISL architecture for years and with this announcement, EMC delivered 50% faster performance than their nearest competitor using FC, which is very impressive.

A PDF version of this can be found at

EMC 2010 July 20 Data Domain new DD670 appliance and mainframe deduplication option with their DLm960 (PDF 265.2 KiB)

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community.

[1] Can be found at http://silvertonconsulting.com/blog/2010/05/14/fast-cache-boost-day2emcworld-2010/

IBM 2009 Oct 20 announcement of new high-end and midrange Disk systems , new Tape systems, and new Tivoli FlashCopy capabilities

Oct 202009

Announcing IBM new high-end and midrange Disk systems , new Tape systems, and new Tivoli FlashCopy capabilities

IBM had a slew of product announcement this past month introducing a new version of their DS8700 Disk Subsystem using the latest PowerPC architecture, a new DS5000 Disk Systems with high density drive enclosure and channel package, a new TS7700 Virtualization Engine with a high density library frame, and new application aware Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager services.

Next generation of DS8700 Disk Subsystem

IBM has updated the DS8700 to use the latest round of IBM PowerPC (POWER6) hardware. This includes higher processing speeds, new faster internal PCI Express internal fabric and faster device adapter ASICs.

All this nets out to over a 150% improvement in sequential workloads and a 100% improvement in random workloads. Cache size is also increased and now supports up to 384GB of cache.

The new PCI Express internal fabric provides for concurrent upgradeability, and faster throughput making the new DS8700 ready to support 8GFC sometime next year. Also power efficiency has been improved to now support over 50% more IOPS/Watt.

IBM also indicated they will support automated data migration for extents (1GB granularity) to be announced next spring, which can help optimize data placement for solid state drives. They already have many tools available today to move volumes or LUNs around within the storage subsystem for both the open and z/OS environments.

IBM also announced enhancements to their full disk encryption support for the DS8700. The new enhancements support PCI-DSS requirements for both disk and self-encrypting tape environments.

New mid-range disk solutions

In addition, IBM announced enhancements to their midrange disk lines. Specifically, IBM has new features for the DS5300 and DS5100 to support SSDs, GigE iSCSI, a new high-density disk enclosure EXP5060 with 60 3.5” disk drives in a 4U form factor, somewhat similar to the HP 70 drive enclosure in 5U. Also they announced 32 and 64GB cache options and support for up to 448 drives on the DS5100.

IBM’s SSDs are from STEC and use the 73GB FC attached drive. The new iSCSI adapter card supports dual ported GigE interfaces for up to 98K random reads and 23K random writes using 256 drives. Also the new iSCSI adapter cards support up to 920MB/s sustained disk reads or 640MB/s sustained write throughput. With the new iSCSI adapter cards the DS5000 can intermix any pair of 8GFC, 4GFC and now GigE iSCSI cards on the same disk subsystem.

(IBM091020-001) (c) 2009 IBM, All Rights Reserved

The new high density EXP5060 drive enclosure supports online maintenance of any shelf drives while IO activity continues on other drives in the shelf. The new enclosure allows up to 448 disk drives to be attached to the DS5000 subsystems when intermixed with the standard drive enclosure EXP5000 or up to 480 drives when using EXP5060 high-density enclosures only.

IBM also announced a new DS3950 Express model. The express model supports two configuration bundles, available for channel sales only outside the US.

TS7700 Virtualization Engine

The latest TS7700 Virtualization Engine for the mainframe environment supports new configuration options that allow up to four clusters within a grid to replicate to one another for business continuance and disaster recovery. Data replication techniques provide a real-time (synchronous) or delayed (asynchronous) copy of data on one or more peer TS7700 Virtualization Engines. In the event of a failure or the need to service one of the TS7700 systems, customer applications may continue to access all logical volumes through the remaining operational TS7700s.

Also, the TS7700 now supports intermix of TS720 and TS7740 models within the same grid allowing two, three or four site grid configurations to be configured with any combination of TS7740’s and TS7720’s. Recall that the TS7720 is a disk cache only and has no physically attached tape, whereas the TS7740 has both disk cache and physically attached tape libraries.

The TS7700 will now support logical WORM for newly created volumes which means that an admin can define volumes which are WORM only and the TS7700 will enforce the security constraint for that volume.

TS3500 high density tape frame

IBM also announced support for over 20K LTO tape cartridges or over 15K 3592 tape cartridges when using high density tape frames in a System Storage TS3500 Tape Library. The Sun SL8500 library currently supports only up to 10K T10K or LTO cartridges.

New application-aware Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager services

Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager now supports application aware flash copies for Oracle, DB, and SAP running on AIX and SQL Server and Exchange Server running on Microsoft Windows platforms. This is similar to NetApp’s SnapManager© services.

FlashCopy Manager will quiesce the application, flush any internal buffers, issue the appropriate IBM disk subsystem FlashCopy request and restart the application automatically without operator intervention. Also FlashCopy manager will identify volumes or LUNs in a consistency group used by an application. Consistency groups are copied together in order to an application consistent copy of the data.

Announcement significance

IBM continues to make incremental enhancements across their storage product lines. Application FlashCopy services should make using FlashCopy a snap for supported applications.

The new DS8700 with the latest generation POWER6 is a good update but when compared to what EMC has done with the V-Max, it looks a bit subdued. Some would say that this was because EMC had many more issues to overcome with the old DMX architecture that they solved with V-Max. Nonetheless, IBM did stress that the current DS8700 uses 93% of the same code as the prior generation DS8000, which EMC does not claim for the V-Max. Also the new midrange offerings are a good step forward.

The new Tape Virtualization systems are another good extension of the present product lines. IBM seems to be increasing market share in the mainframe tape virtualization space. In the meantime, all the churn at Sun-Oracle must be helping as well.

A PDF version of this can be found at

IBM 2009 Oct 20 Announcements of new DS8700, enhancements to mid-range disk systems and new Tape systems (PDF 599.1 KiB)

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community

EMC 2008 May 19 announcement of DL Deduplication and New Avamar® DataStore

May 192008

EMC World Announcements: DL Deduplication and New Avamar® DataStore

EMC announced in Las Vegas the latest iteration of their Disk Library product line which now includes partner supplied target deduplication technology as well as a new generation of Avamar® DataStore

Disk Library (DL) Target Deduplication

EMC’s next version of their high-end disk library (DL 4X00) and the newly introduced low-end DL 3D 1500 and DL 3D 3000 will support target deduplication. DL 3D 1500 and DL 3D 3000 support software oriented deduplication while the DL 3D 4000 will support added hardware to provide deduplication services.

Deduplication technology can be provided at the backup source or target. EMC Avamar® and Symantec PureDisk both provide source deduplication technology, integrated with special backup software that is ideally suited for remote office backup to central sites. Last year EMC announced (see SCI’s EMC070904 StorInt™ Dispatch) support for an Avamar client connected to a NetWorker backup server that could provide both remote and central site source deduplication for backup data.

Target deduplication technology supports any software, appliance, or service that writes to either disk or tape as a backup target. Disk targets support NAS interfaces (NFS or CIFS) for backup to disk. VTL technology can attach to any software that writes tape data, which includes all backup systems and has much wider applicability. The low-end DL 3D 1500 and 3000 support both NAS and VTL operations and the DL 3D 4000 only supports VTL. Target deduplication technology is currently available from DataDomain, FalconStor, NetApp, Quantum DXI, Sepaton, and now EMC.

One ongoing concern with this technology has been the processing overhead required to deduplicate data. EMC’s offering, supplied by their partner Quantum, can be configured to support offline deduplication for higher data ingest performance or conversely can be configured to support parallel deduplication while data is being ingested. Ingestion throughput may suffer by using parallel deduplication but the capacity required to buffer data while waiting for offline deduplication is minimized.

The DL 3D 1500 and DL 3D 3000 are available immediately and support a maximum of 36TB and 148TB of deduped backup data storage respectively. The DL 3D 4000 deduplication engine will be available in late July and although EMC has not released maximum capacities yet for this product, the current version supports over 670 TB using 750GB SATA drives. EMC has announced support for 1TB SATA drives on the new DL 3D 4000.

Also announced was a new spin down capability for the DL4000 and DL 3D 4000. Particularly useful for backup targets when not active, drives can be spun down to minimize power consumption. Combining this with the new 1TB SATA drives will improve power consumption considerably.

Avamar® Enhancements

Avamar’s DataStore size has been doubled to 2TB per node. With a 16-node configuration and 500X dedupe compression ratio, a fully configured DataStore could support a PB of backup data. Compression rates are highly dependant on backup cycle and the amount of data duplicated throughout your storage, so your results may depart significantly from projected results.

Announcement significance

Deduplication technology is breaking out all over what with IBM purchasing Diligent, FalconStor solving their deduplication problems, DataDomain still leading the market and the rest of the players trying to keep up. EMC’s move to support target deduplication levels the playing field somewhat, at least until the next round.

A PDF version of this can be found at

EMC 2008 May 19 Announces new deduplicating Disk Libraries and revised Avamar (PDF 233.4 KiB)

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community

Data Domain 2008 May 12 announcement of their new DD690 appliance and file level locking for file retention

May 122008

Data Domain announces new DD690 appliance and file level locking for file retention

Data Domain recently announced the DD690 high end appliance and today announced a new file level locking capability for secure file retention with nearline applications

DD690 appliance

Once again Data Domain introduces the latest processor technology in their high-end deduplication appliance. The DD690 supports a new quad-core Intel processor and provides 600GB/hour single stream inline deduplication and 1.4TB per hour for aggregated deduplication across all streams. The DD690 comes with internal storage or can be supported in a gateway configuration, DD690g, which can attach to any 3rd party fibre connected storage. DD690 can be configured with up to 35TB of usable capacity which given the usual 3-months after install deduplication compression ratios of 20 to 50 to 1, supports up to 1.7PB of deduplicated data.

Similar to other Data Domain systems, the DD690 supports NAS interfaces such as NDMP, CIFS, and NFS in the base product but can be separately licensed for VTL operations as well. Data Domain can also be separately licensed for Symantec’s OpenStorage API (OST) allowing management of their appliance from NetBackup’s management console.

Data Domain systems support remote office backup and replication through a hub and spoke configuration. Their previous high-end appliance supported at most 20 remote systems replicating to a one central hub. The new DD690 now supports up to 60 remote systems replicating to itself as the central hub. Just like other Data Domain systems the DD690 supports both local and global de-duplication for remote office backup/replication. By doing both local and global deduplication for remote office backup/replication WAN traffic can be optimized and take less bandwidth.

Data Domain Nearline focus

Recently Data Domain has been making inroads into the non-primary storage space. As they support NAS interfaces they can be attached as secondary or nearline file storage. As such they can support any archive software solution, which uses NAS file system interfaces. As a nearline device Data Domain provides deduplication services at no additional cost to these archive and non-primary storage applications.

On the other hand, Data Domain provides a number of “non-targets” for nearline use such as applications requiring high IOPS, data with poor de-duplication potential, data that will never be read, and data under strict compliance regimens.

File level locking

In order to add value to their nearline offerings, Data Domain just announced support for file locking for retention. This capability utilizes file attribute fields to specify how long a file should be retained unmodified and when it can be deleted. These facilities have been in use now for years by other file retention products, allowing Data Domain to easily support the growing cadre of data archive solutions available on the market.

Retention Lock software is a separately license-able feature on a system or appliance basis. If this capability is used in remote office environments, file retention attributes can be set at the remote office and will be honored at the central hub as well.

Announcement significance

Data Domain continues to roll out new and faster system appliances to match customer requirements. As an inline deduplication vendor, efficiency and following the performance curve upward is critical to their continued success. Moving into the nearline storage indicates a broadening the market for deduplication technology. They have maintained their lead in deduplication market(s) and from everything we can see, they intend to keep it.

A PDF version of this can be found at

Data Domain 2008 May 12 Announces new DD690 appliance and new file level locking (PDF 229.6 KiB)

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community

EMC 2008 February 25 announcement of their new DLm product and new RecoverPoint features

Feb 252008

EMC announced a new Disk Library product targeted at the mainframe space and they have enhanced RecoverPoint their CDP and CRR appliance with new Clariion write splitting.

Disk Library mainframe (DLm)

Once again the mainframe space is in the news. DLm is EMC’s product to compete with Sun StorageTek VSM and IBM Ts7700 and VTS products. DLm supports emulation of up to 256 tape drives per virtual tape engine (VTE), two to four VTEs per subsystem and up to 190TB of raw disk capacity. A DLm virtual cartridge can be up to 2TB in size and the DLm emulates a virtually unlimited number of virtual cartridges. The product also supports standard IDRC outboard hardware compression and the backend storage is RAID protected SATA disk drives. The DLm emulates IBM 3480, 3490 and/or 3590 tape drives. The product ships with either four or eight FICON channels or alternatively can be configured to support six or 12 ESCON channels, based on two or four VTEs. One can also attach up to two real tape drives to support physical cartridge exporting.

This product grew out of a successful Bus-Tech based product which was sold through the EMC select program. However this new DLm brings full EMC support behind it.

One key factor is that a virtual tape cartridge is stored as a file on the backend disk. As such, virtual cartridges only take up disk space when written and by definition can be shared across all virtual tape drives. The DLm provides virtually unlimited tape volumes.

Throughput per DLm is rated at 600MB/s native and hardware compression can double these numbers. Currently Sun’s VSM 5 throughput is ~610MB/s and IBM’s TS7700 R1.4 is rated at 600MB/s so DLm competes well in performance.

Missing from todays DLm is remote replication capabilities. TS7700 R1.4 supports three way, IP based replication where one master TS7700 can be replicated to two satellite TS7700’s. VSM only supports two way replication capability. EMC did preannounce two way remote replication capability to be available Q3’08, based on IP using asynchronous replication.

VSM and VTS have always been high margin products. Although these products have a number of applications, there use in batch processing seems a good fit for DLm. In this application, data is read from virtual tape, processed by an application and then written out to another virtual tape. Using DLm for these applications provides a number of advantages:

Real tape had problems with relatively small volumes taking up a large capacity cartridge. Volume stacking solved this but added complexity. With DLM data never leaves disk and volume stacking is a non-issue.
Real tape has media life issues. As tape cartridges are read and written they degrade and must be replaced with fresh media. There is no real tape use in the DLm so media life is a non-issue. Although disk drives can also degrade. For either media type, redundancy reduces data loss exposure, e.g. for disk, RAID and for tape, data copies must be used to minimize data loss.
Real tape has higher mechanical failures. Tape drives and robotics ultimately fail and depending on library version may or may not be disruptive to fix. DLm with no real tape drive/automation is less likely to fail and is also completely non-disruptive to fix.

RecoverPoint Enhancements

A new RecoverPoint Clariion CX3 based write splitter is now available which eliminates the need for host software modifications or intelligent fabric switch hardware for write splitting. This provides for a much simpler RecoverPoint installation and much less expensive implementation than the intelligent fabric. With the new CX3 splitter, one can use host-, fabric-, or controller-based write splitting with RecoverPoint. In addition the CX3 splitter now supports other operating systems especially VMware’s VMFS and RD mode I/O. Also, any of the splitter approaches can be used at the target or the source for a replication consistency group. In addition to the new splitter, new support for 4Gb/s FC and enhanced JAVA GUI were announced to make RecoverPoint easier and faster to use.

EMC also announced a new RecoverPoint capability that supports concurrent CDP and CRR for the same consistency group. In this case both the local and remote site have independent copies of the data as well as independent copies of the journal used to support CDP/CRR. This allows for increased flexibility to deal with partial failures at the local or remote sites.

Announcement significance

The mainframe continues as a lucrative market. Given the limited physical tape support available with DLm (two SCSI tape drive attachments) it’s unlikely to replace much use of VSM and TS7700. Also DLm’s lack of de-duplication makes using this product for backup less likely. Nonetheless, mainframe batch processing is probably responsible for 95% of all the bills produced monthly and mainframe customers have more than enough money to spend on any technology that can help them do batch better.

The RecoverPoint announcements were less exciting but show a continuing push with this technology and an increasingly tighter integration with EMC’s traditional storage product lines. All of which make this technology easier to use and more valuable to EMC’s install base.

A PDF version of this file can be found at

EMC 2008 February 25 announcement of new DLm and RecoverPoint features (PDF 245.4 KiB)

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community

FalconStor 2008 January 22 announcement of their new VTL5 Enterprise Edition

Jan 222008

This Silverton Consulting (SCI) Storage Intelligence (StorInt™) Dispatch provides a summary of FalconStor’s latest VTL5 Enterprise Edition product announcement.

VTL5 Summary

FalconStor is taking de-duplication technology to the next level with the introduction of its SIR clustering capabilities fully integrated with its latest edition of FalconStor VTL for the enterprise. VTL5 Enterprise Edition supports a 4-node cluster called the Single Instance Repository (SIR). De-duplication is done in a “concurrent overlap” fashion.

VTL 5 architecture

VTL scales up to 8 nodes as a single group of 4 VTL HA pairs. Each node of the VTL is capable of ~1.2GB/s sustained throughput, totaling 9.6 GB/s. SIR clusters can be configured today from 1 to 4 servers (in an N+1 configuration) with up to a maximum of 256TB of disk storage. Data is de-duplicated across all the servers in a SIR cluster.

FalconStor performs de-duplication processing in a “concurrent overlap” mode. This means de-duplication can begin as soon as a virtual tape volume is closed and need not wait for the backup process to complete. Also, depending on the amount of cluster nodes/processing power devoted to de-duplication, several volumes can be de-duplicated in parallel.

Also, VTL5 does de-duplication at the sub-file or “chunk” level. A “chunk” is SIR configurable from one to many data blocks long. Sub-file de-duplication can more effectively factor modified files identifying chunks that are unique and those that are duplicate. By doing this, VTL5 provides better de-duplication and consumes less storage for modified files.

VTL5 supports remote office replication to a central data center. De-duplication is done locally at the remote site and then globally (across remote site replicas) at the central site. As such, only unique data is sent from the remote sites to the central site. When a remote site starts to send a “chunk” of data, a signature is computed over the data chunk and this is then sent to the central site to be compared to all other chunk signatures.

If the signature is unique the data is unique and must be sent
If the signature is a duplicate, the data is a duplicate and is not sent

This conserves network bandwidth for sending unique data.

In addition, VTL5 supports “data at rest” encryption. Data encryption is done when transferring data to physical media. Secured data is exported to physical tape. FalconStor provides key management for this “data at rest” encryption.

Furthermore, FalconStor VTL will support Symantec’s Net Backup APIs providing for management of VTLs. This allows Net Backup administrators to directly manage VTL activity, export real tape volumes, monitor de-duplicated space consumption and other VTL specific activities. As such, use of these APIs should simplify the administration of VTL5 and should lead to quicker adoption of VTL5 in Net Backup environments.

Finally, FalconStor has one of the longest lists of VTL supported tape drives, media, and libraries in the industry. FalconStor also OEMs their product to a number of vendors, most notably IBM, EMC, and Sun which means their interoperability matrix is validated by some of the most thorough test groups available.

Announcement significance

VTL de-duplication is heating up. SCI has long felt that FalconStor was a bit behind the competition with their prior offerings. With VTL5 Enterprise Edition, FalconStor now comes much closer to parity and even beyond current competition, in some respects.

De-duplication’s processing intensity and throughput overhead has historically limited its application to data centers below the enterprise class. Today, FalconStor’s VTL5 goes a long way to eradicating this limitation.

A PDF version of this can be found at

FalconStor 2008 January 22 announcement of FalconStor VTL5 Enterprise Edition (PDF 233.3 KiB)

Silverton Consulting, Inc. is a Storage, Strategy & Systems consulting services company, based in the USA offering products and services to the data storage community.

EMC 2007 Oct 15 announces new NetWorker, Backup Advisor software, and new DL 4000 drives

Oct 152007

This Silverton Consulting (SCI) Storage Intelligence (StorInt™) Dispatch provides a summary of EMC’s recent NetWorker announcements providing new capabilities integrating Avamar and RecoverPoint technology with NetWorker. New Disk Library capabilities and new Backup Advisor and HomeBase versions were also announced.

EMC New NetWorker capabilities

EMC mentioned over 25,000 customer installations and the 15 years of NetWorker software in the field. In addition to support for the new DL4000 capabilities (see below), NetWorker has also been enhanced to integrate Avamar and RecoverPoint technology.

A new NetWorker client has been released which supports Avamar technology as a backup target and fully supports Avamar source data de-duplication. An Avamar server can be designated as a target for a NetWorker backup stream. NetWorker supports backup streams to go to the Avamar server, to the normal NetWorker server or to both. This is completely selectable on a backup set basis. The Avamar server is sold separately and can use any of the current Avamar server deployments including the new Avamar DataStore as well as the Avamar Virtual Edition running as a virtual machine under VMware.

RecoverPoint is now integrated with NetWorker and can be managed under the NetWorker management console. NetWorker with a RecoverPoint server can now take advantage of storage snapshots and other advanced functions to provide continuous data protection and less painful backups.

EMC New Disk Library 4000 capabilities

EMC mentioned that they have deployed over 150 PB of Disk Library storage.

DL 4000 now supports the 1-TB SATA drive technology for a significant increase in capacity while simultaneously reducing energy consumption. In addition DL4000 now supports RAID 6 or dual parity RAID as well as the optional hardware compression already available on DL 4000.

EMC New Backup Advisor and HomeBase capabilities

EMC Backup Advisor Version 3 has support for more languages and additional backup software packages including CommVault Galaxy and CA ArcServe. Also Backup Advisor now supports Windows Vista as well as 64-bit Linux operating systems.

EMC HomeBase Version 6.0 also includes support for more languages and an entry-level version, which provides bare metal restore for data centers fewer than 30 servers. The entry-level support is targeted for EMC indirect channels that handle small accounts and prior to this release really had no HomeBase solution.

Announcement significance

EMC has been on an acquisition spree of late and we now see how the pieces are coming together. On this note, the RecoverPoint integration into the management console is a necessary first step but doesn’t go very far enough down that integration road.

On the other hand, the new NetWorker client support for the Avamar server was a significant change. For one thing, we were a little confused over the positioning of the old Avamar versus NetWorker and this move seems to make that issue moot – if you want data de-dupe buy an Avamar server and install the new client. More significantly, this release now brings the latest source data de-duplication technology to the vast NetWorker install base without requiring a major software swap out (NetWorker for Avamar). Source data de-duplication addresses both the time to do backups as well as the space required to keep backups online. Avamar technology via NetWorker represents a relatively painless and quick way to address critical customer concerns while also opening up the potential install base for Avamar technology – smart.

In contrast, the Disk Library announcements were not too surprising. EMC did announce that they were the first storage company to support the 1-TB drive in a disk library configuration. Also as drives get bigger, rebuild time goes up and therefore risk of additional drive failures during reconstruction goes up – enter RAID 6 which can handle the simultaneous failure of two disk drives in a RAID group while still maintaining data integrity.

Finally, the two software announcements were somewhat less significant. They were both logical extensions of current products. Although the HomeBase entry-level version may warrant some discussion – it’s unusual to see small data centers concerned with disaster recovery let alone need bare metal restores. This offering provides a new unique capability but whether the market can use it is another question.

A PDF version of this can be found at:

EMC 2007 October 15 New NetWorker, Disk Library, Backup Advisor and Homebase (PDF 205.5 KiB)

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