Measuring Up in the Enterprise

In my last post, I spoke directly to the claim by competitors that Data Domain is not an enterprise solution. I indicated that the number one capability our largest customers require is immediate, reliable and efficient replication of deduplicated data, as it has tremendous cost-saving benefits for organizations that are still using tape for offsite DR. In fact, it was the focus of a presentation I gave last week to a large customer looking to expand their Data Domain implementation and standardize on our solution across all branches. During our meeting, we discussed the metric against which dedupe replication as a DR solution is measured, Time-to-DR. This is the period of time measured from the start of the first job in the backup window to the completion of replication for all jobs. The high-level steps that make up the process measured by the time-to-DR metric are:

1. Full backup
2. Replication
3. Data consistent and readable from replica

To understand how Data Domain Replicator achieves the fastest end-to-end data movement, lets work through these steps using the example of a subsequent full backup of a 20TB dataset, that is then replicated using an OC-3 (155mbps) WAN link to a DR site.

1) Data Domain inline deduplication is capable of backup throughput of 2.7TB/hr, so 20TB can be completely backed up within 7.4 hours. At a 50x reduction (combination of deduplication and compression), this will result in ~400GB of data that needs to be physically stored and replicated.

2) Because data is deduplicated inline, Data Domain Replicator can begin moving the deduplicated data immediately. This enables the data movement process to run concurrently with the backup window, as well as ensures that data is recoverable at file/image/job level as soon as it has been replicated. In this case, replication over the OC-3 can keep up with the backup process and will complete within minutes of completion of the backup, and within an eight hour window from the start of the first backup.

3) By design, data is continuously consistent on the Data Domain replica - no additional steps are required to make the data readable. This means that as soon as replication completes the data movement, the 20TB of data is fully protected and available for both local restores in the primary site and recovery in the DR site in the event of a disaster.

For any enterprise customer looking at using deduplication to enable offsite disaster recovery, this best practice test of protecting a large dataset (20-30TB), replicating, and recovering from the replica should be mandatory.