Howard, I have a pair of DDR410s and pair of DDR510's that are configured for NFS. The 510's are being used to store vRanger backups of a VM environment. Compression/deduplication is incredible for this application. 47TB(terabytes) are stored on 811GB (Gigabytes). Now realize that there is a lot of redundancy with VMs and this environment does not experience a lot of change, but the ability to store 30+ days worth of full backups of 30 or 40 VMs on less than a TB or storage, approaches the cost of tape (excluding electricity). The 510 and 410 models are out of date and I have not messed with the VTL configuration so cannot speak to that specific feature.
Configuration is relatively simple. Performance is nothing to brag about for these models (except the deduplication/compression), The one drawback is that a couple of filesystem reconfiguration tasks require taking the filesystem offline. The systems have been running for several years with only an occasional disk replacement. OS upgrades are relatively straightforward - outage required. I did some testing with TSM using an NFS mount. TSM was configured to use the NFS mount with FILE device class with 2GB files. My intention was to compare DDR deduplication with TSM deduplication. I never got back to testing TSM deduplication but the DDR deduplication was 281GB stored on 58GB = 80% savings. Now this data was from a handfull of windows workstations, so there was a lot or redundancy in the data. Generally, I found the DDRs simple to set up, reliable, maintainable, and do what they are supposed to do - crush bits together into the smallest possible space. Performance is good - just don't expect a screaming fast system - at the low end. The high end systems and newer systems advertise greater performance. Cheers, Neil Strand Storage Engineer - Legg Mason Baltimore, MD. (410) 580-7491 Whatever you can do or believe you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic. -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ads...@vm.marist.edu] On Behalf Of Howard Coles Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 4:58 PM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: [ADSM-L] DataDomain VTL Is anyone out there using a DataDomain VTL? I'm getting some pressure to look at this, and I'd like to find some honest opinions of them. I know that some time back there were some conversations around this, but some tech has been updated and DD has been bought by EMC, etc. So, if you have one, and would like to share your opinion I'd appreciate it. See Ya' Howard Coles Jr. Sr. Systems Engineer (615) 296-3416 John 3:16! IMPORTANT: E-mail sent through the Internet is not secure. Legg Mason therefore recommends that you do not send any confidential or sensitive information to us via electronic mail, including social security numbers, account numbers, or personal identification numbers. Delivery, and or timely delivery of Internet mail is not guaranteed. Legg Mason therefore recommends that you do not send time sensitive or action-oriented messages to us via electronic mail. This message is intended for the addressee only and may contain privileged or confidential information. Unless you are the intended recipient, you may not use, copy or disclose to anyone any information contained in this message. If you have received this message in error, please notify the author by replying to this message and then kindly delete the message. Thank you.