WYSIWYG

This past week at SNW Spring in Orlando, Florida, Data Domain participated in the inaugural Deduplication Hands-on Lab. Our lab started with a series of excercises that had the users interacting with data in a CIFS share on a pair of Data Domain DD530 systems, with the following three learning objectives:

1. Analyze the effects of inline deduplication on files stored to a CIFS share on a Data Domain deduplication storage system.
2. Create deduplicated snapshots to provide point-in-time recovery of previous versions of files.

3. Recover data from a replicated copy on secondary Data Domain system.

Students really liked these exercises, which had them using the Data Domain systems as NAS storage - many of them followed up at our in-booth demo with F5 ARX file virtualization to get further insight into how they can deploy this technology in their enterprise. During the second half of the lab, students worked within Net Backup 6.5 to perform backup, optimized duplication and replica recovery operations using Data Domain OpenStorage software. Interestingly, while feedback to the entire lab was very positive, it is the step shown below - where students use a CLI monitoring tool to observe the real-time effects of inline deduplication - that continues to have the greatest impact on illustrating what inline deduplication really means.

With Data Domain, what you see is what you get: deduplication occurs inline, and only unique data is written to the physical disk - notice the significant difference between inbound data on the network interface (a) and data written to disk (b), and that disk activity never exceeds 2%. This exercise illustrates our CPU-centric inline deduplication at work.

Time and again, students, and even representatives of other vendors in the lab, would watch this and have their own version of an ahh-ha moment - they were seeing for themselves that with Data Domain deduplication storage, writing data and deduplicating data are the same process. For administrators, this makes all the difference, as unlike post-process deduplication, with inline deduplication there is no need to manage different pools of storage for landing native data, no need to predict when deduplication will finish and replication will start, or where data will be recovered from, and no need to provision extra storage as a hedge against the inherent unpredictability of the post-process. Of course, vendors will try to hide these details and spin them into features and benefits (until you read the manual), but from what I observed, the customers eyes are now wide open.

Comments

[Viet]

The OST lab also had positive feedback especially those already running NetBackup. I had a couple of "that's slick" comments.