Data Domain adds to backup performance

Data Domain plans to announce this week a disk-based backup and recovery appliance that is faster and has more capacity than the company’s virtual tape library offerings.

The new gear consists of the DDX Series appliance and two controllers, the DD560 and DD560/g. The DDX Series, which is powered by an Intel Xeon controller, offers as much as 6.4TB per hour of throughput and as much as 15 petabytes of capacity. It features as many as 16 DD560 or DD460 controllers and storage in a single configuration. The DD560 and DD560/g have a throughput of 400GB per hour and a maximum capacity of 980TB.

"We do all our incremental as well as our weekly backups to the Data Domain appliance and then take our weeklies to tape," says Paul Scheib, director of operations and CISO at Children's Hospital in Boston, which has deployed two new DD560s and several DD400s.

Click to see: Data Domain DDX Series

The DDX Series can be deployed across 320 remote locations and can be used for multisite disaster recovery.

All of Scheib's Data Domain appliances are in a remote secondary data center. "We run our backups across the fiber-optic network," he says. "If the appliances were in a data center where our servers are, if we lost the data center for some reason, we wouldn't have the safety of a remote site backup."

The DDX Series uses the same operating system as previous appliances. It is available as the DD560, an appliance that integrates storage capacity with the controller, or as the DD560/g, which is a gateway that connects to other vendors' storage.

Data Domain appliances also deduplicate backup data inline. After the initial backup, the Data Domain software reduces the amount of data stored by saving unique elements of data to disk.

"Data Domain is raising the bar in terms of scalability by moving disk-based data protection and deduplication into the mainstream as an alternative offering to traditional enterprise VTL solutions," says Greg Schulz, senior analyst at StorageIO.

The DDX Series competes with VTL offerings from Copan Systems, HP and EMC. Unlike the appliances from these vendors, Data Domain's new products include data deduplication technology and with its DD560/g appliance, network-attached storage connectivity.

The DD560 and DD560/g support a 64-bit operating system and Data Domain's Replicator for WAN Vaulting for disaster recovery. The DDX Series starts at $95,000 for 100TB Serial Advanced Technology Attachment storage.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.