In an earlier thread, I polled this group on whether people recommend going with an array-based dedup solution or doing a TSM dedup solution. Well, the answers came back mixed, obviously with an 'It depends'-type clause.
So, moving on… assuming that I'm using TSM dedup, what sort of target arrays are people putting behind their TSM servers. Assume here, also, that you'll be having multiple TSM servers, another backup product, *coughveeam and potentially having to do backup stgpools on the dedup stgpools. I ask because I've been barking up the mid-tier storage array market as our potential disk based backup target simply because of the combination of cost, performance, and scalability. I'd prefer something that is dense I.e. more capacity less footprint and can scale up to 400TB. It seems like vendors get disappointed when you're asking for a 400TB array with just SATA disk simply for backup targets. None of that fancy array intelligence like auto-tiering, large caches, replication, dedup, etc.. is required. Is there another storage market I should be looking at, I.e. really dumb raid arrays, direct attached, NAS, etc… Any feedback is appreciated, even the 'it depends'-type. Thanks! Sergio