Hi Mark,
You were right to explore lower cost alternative solutions for your
deduplication needs. As a long-time Data Domain customer you have firsthand
experience on how expensive those solutions can be. It is unfortunate however
that at the time you were evaluating a newer, lower cost dedupe solution, you
were unable to see and experience the full potential of the “end-to-end
deduplication” capabilities currently available with NetBackup 7 and our new
line of NetBackup 5000 deduplication appliances.
The resulting power of our approach gives you the choice and flexibility to
deploy deduplication at the source, at the media server, and a simple, easy to
deploy, and yet highly scalable target global deduplication appliance as well.
Symantec NetBackup 7 Deduplication allows you to simultaneously deploy and
configure both source and target based dedupe with-in the same infrastructure
and with-out incurring exorbitant costs or deploying incompatible solutions.
This is simply not possible with an EMC deduplication solution. You must
choose between two incompatible solutions, Data Domain and Avamar, both of
which can be 2x-5x more expensive than the Symantec Deduplication solution.
NetBackup 7 has deduplication built right in. It is easily configured at the
source or at the media server with just a backup policy settings. Simply turn
it on and you will quickly see the significant performance gains from reducing
network loads and reduced backup time in either virtual or physical
environments. The Symantec 5000 line of deduplication appliances can also
make your life very simple. As you mentioned earlier, you needed to figure
out which Data Domain appliances you needed, most likely the minimum to keep
the costs down. In each case, once they are full, you will need to EOL those
units and buy larger, more expensive units as they are incompatible and cannot
be connected to create a larger global deduplication pool. Pretty expensive.
The new NetBackup 5000 appliances can be individually added (mix/match) and
scaled to meet the needs of just about any enterprise data center. The beauty
of this approach is the ability to add more and larger appliances to your
global pool as they become available to create even larger global pools as your
data continues to grow. Again, tough to do with either Data Domain or Avamar.
With the rapidly evolving changes in IT infrastructures, the ability to easily
select a dedupe configuration that best fits your needs today while letting you
tune it for maximum performance, whether virtual or physical, and then be able
to easily change it without throwing any of it away, I think would be of
tremendous value to you and your organization. We would hope that when your
Data Domain is reaching its EOL, you would give Symantec the opportunity to
demonstrate the power of its complete deduplication solution, and show you how
we can help you to better manage your storage dollars.
Thanks!
Pat McDonald
Principal Systems Engineer
Symantec Corporation
From: veritas-bu-boun...@mailman.eng.auburn.edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-boun...@mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Mark Glazerman
Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2011 7:18 AM
To: Fred M
Cc: veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] PureDisk vs. DataDomain
We use both here and have been for over 4 years. We use Data Domain
for all of our data center backups and Puredisk (the original appliance based
version) for all of our remote file server backups. We did look into Netbackup
7’s built in dedupe which uses the puredisk dedupe engine to allow both client
side and media server dedupe of backups to any disk storage backends but just
couldn’t get the compression we get out of the data domain appliances. As an
example, our data domains currently house approximately 35 copies of our
exchange backups (700GB during a full backup) in 3.8TB of raw. We presented
the same amount of storage from a dell equallogic storage array to a netbackup
dedupe pool and we couldn’t fit 4 copies of that same exchange data.
We’ve done countless reference calls for Data Domain detailing our
consideration of Netbackups built in dedupe and our findings. The biggest
problem is the Netbackup Puredisk dedupe uses a fixed block algorithm where as
the Data Domain’s use a variable block algorithm. This allows the Data Domain
appliances to generate much greater compression.
The backup performance was comparable across both solutions but just
like we’ve seen with our appliance based puredisk environment, restores from
the Data Domain’s were MUCH faster than from the puredisk storage. Netbackup 7
has improved the restore speeds but it’s still not comparable to the 100GB
/hour restore speeds we get (simultaneously across multiple platforms /
applications) at our Disaster recovery exercises. In our production puredisk
environment, if we need to restore a 100GB file server to ship out to a plant
it can take up to 10-12 hours to restore.
If you have a HUGE pool of money to spend on back end disk then
Netbackup 7’s built in dedupe may still be an option for you. However, we’d
have needed to purchase more than 10X the raw disk capacity of our data domain
appliances in order to be able to house the same amount of deduped data that
our Data Domain’s currently store. As existing Data Domain customers, this was
not financially viable and even the lure of a one stop shop for all backup
storage was not big enough for us to jump ship after 4+ years as Data Domain
users.
We started off with two dd430’s and later added two dd560’s. Now have
two DD670’s setup in a replication pair and use Storage Lifecycle Policies
(SLP’s) inside Netbackup coupled with the optional Open Storage (OST) plugin to
manage all but a handful of backup policies. The OST plugin lets us make use
of the Optimized duplication technology to reduce bandwidth utilization between
our main data center and our DR site and the tighter integration with Netbackup
gives us additional visibility of both our primary and now also our duplicated
images from inside the catalog.
Yes… I’m a Data Domain fan but that’s not because I’m getting paid to
say this stuff. It’s because it works flawlessly, has got us out of some real
binds and makes my boss look like a rockstar at our twice yearly DR tests. If
we’d seen similar numbers from Netbackup then I’d be singing a different tune
but for now, Data Domain has my vote.
Mark Glazerman
Desk: 314-889-8282
Cell: 618-520-3401
P please don't print this e-mail unless you really need to
From: veritas-bu-boun...@mailman.eng.auburn.edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-boun...@mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Fred M
Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2011 10:14 PM
To: veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] PureDisk vs. DataDomain
Hi all,
My employer is requesting I evaluate PureDisk and DataDomain for
de-duplication. While I can setup a demo of each and get the numbers, and ask
the sales guys what makes them great and why their competitors aren't, I can't
trust that is nothing more than sales drivel. So, I ask you expert users. Can
anyone tell me what their experiences are with DataDomain and PureDisk and why
you went with that solution from a technical perspective? You know, the typical
pro/con deal.
Thanks for the help!
~~Fred~~
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