Every time we come out with a bigger, faster system, I get excited about all the new customers who will benefit from deploying our technology. This past Monday, Data Domain announced the DD880, our newest deduplication storage system. The full details of the release can be found here. This system presents about 70TB of usable capacity per controller, twice that of the DD690 and more than doubles the maximum throughput to 5.4TB/hr. A year ago, large enterprise customers were very excited by the DD690, and that system is now successfully deployed in many large datacenters. I imagine the DD880 will be equally well received.
On the other hand, vendors with post-process deduplication solutions might be less enthusiastic. After all, the fundamental premise of their marketing has been that post-process systems are faster and bigger. In reality, the inline deduplication throughput of a single DD880 exceeds the speed at which they can ingest data in native form to a 2-node post-process system. And the higher physical capacities they claim as a benefit? They are but a side effect of the disk i/o and caching requirements of post-process deduplication – you can’t actually protect a larger dataset with all that space. It’s kind of like a car salesperson pointing out the massive fuel tank in a gas guzzler as a competitive advantage, while disregarding the mileage it gets.
A single DD880 can deduplicate 60TB inline, while concurrently replicating the deduplicated data, all within a 12 hour window. As with all of our previous new product releases, performance and capacity increases are derived from upgrades to the processors and associated hardware in our systems. This is the power of Data Domain SISL, our CPU-centric approach which enables fast inline deduplication using a minimum amount of disk. In comparison to the DD880, for the same 60TB backup a post-process deduplication system would require at least 2-4x more physical disk and significantly more compute power in the form of complex multi-node configurations. It just doesn’t make sense why our competitors would expect customers to do this.
In the end, this is about one thing – Data Domain has enabled a paradigm shift in disk storage for data protection and disaster recovery because once our technology is deployed, customers can save money. The bottom line value of post-process deduplication, with its need for more of everything, will never match us. Good luck to those vendors that decide to keep trying.
