Another "Ahh-ha" Moment

 
Last week, eWeek published an article reviewing Data Domain systems, focusing on our ease of deployment and capabilities for disaster recovery:

Data Domain Leads Growing List of Deduplication Vendors

The testing included using Data Domain OpenStorage Software, which allows NetBackup 6.5 to manage our WAN-efficient replication process. The article also notes real-world performance of 300-500 MB/s on our DD690 systems. 

In my last post, I spoke about the "ahh-ha" moment that I had as a customer of Data Domain.  Throughout my time in the field, I found that this was a common experience for many of our customers as well. Reading through the article, it would seem that the author, Matt Sarrel, was able to grok things as well:

"Given the amount of data required to maintain business continuity across a multi-location enterprise, traditional backup methodologies are being stretched to and even beyond their limits...(Data Domain) is capable of not only removing these limits, but also shattering them in such a way that you’ll rethink (and enhance) current business continuity processes."

Perhaps you've had your own "ahh-ha" moment with deduplication - post a comment, I'd love to hear about it.

Comments

[Rich Colbert]

My Ahh-ha moment with dedupe and Data Domain happened quite some time ago. In 2005 I spent most of my time working on a large VMware 2.5 deployment. Back then, server virtualization was not the no-brainer that it is today. As a side project, I deployed Data Domain to alleviate some challenges in a large NetBackup environment. At the end of the year, I reflected upon the fact that I had spent about 51 weeks on VMware, blade servers, and all the related hardware, software, and processes to support the environment. I spent about one week on Data Domain. In both cases it was time well spent, and in both cases real problems were eliminated with the new solutions. It was an epiphany to realize that the measure of impact for both projects was more or less equal to their respective environments.

It was at that moment that I became a believer that dedupe was on a parallel course with server virtualization, and that server virtualization merely had a few years head start. Fast forward to 2009 and I think it's becoming evident that dedupe belongs on every IT managers short list of important technologies for the year.

[Tony Asaro]

I talked about my "aha" moment - it was when we were doing the hands-on analysis and witnessed the data dedupe. And then it hit me again when we talked to about six of your customers and they were all getting around 20 to 1 or better in real world environments.

[Viet Phan]

One 'aha' moment was when I demonstrated dedupe to an engineer from a major competitor. We compared in real-time the amount of data coming into the Data Domain System vs. the amount written to disk. His jaw dropped then asked "are you guys hiring?"