I met with Michael Passe - storage architect for Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. He has been with them for more than 11 years. He is using the Data Domain DD580 and DD690 solutions. Michael's role is to provide the storage strategy going forward for Beth Israel, including new platforms, products and technologies. Here are some highlights from our discussion:
"Mainly we were having a lot of problems with the management overhead of tape. Tape is a very mechanical construct with tapes getting stuck in drives. It made sense to get something more automated and RAID protected. It was fairly easy for us to figure out that tapes needed to go."
"Data Domain was the very early leader in this space. We have a long standing relationship with EMC, so we took careful consideration to what they had to offer at the time. The big thing for us is that we didn't believe in the VTL paradigm. This NAS idea of using standard-based protocols made a lot of sense to us."
"The real value of Data Domain is the iterative nature of backup - you make multiple backups in a week or a month and depending on your retention, that's where you build up to get to their claim of 20 to 1, which we are pretty close to. Both of our Data Domain clusters are receiving about 18, 19 to 1 on average day over day. Right now our Exchange environment is seeing 10 to 1. Other applications are seeing anywhere from 40 to 1 for Oracle and Sequel depending on how they are backed up."
Michael and I also discussed his challenges for 2009 and their emphasis going forward is to really focus on optimization. One of their goals is to start using Data Domain as an archive tier - moving infrequently accessed data from primary storage to Data Domain and getting further value from deduping.
The trend I see is that a large number of IT professionals have and continue to embrace disk-to-disk backup with data dedupe - which is being perceived as a 'no-brainer" to an increasingly wider population. The next step is to leverage that same technology for greater optimization for online storage - an archive tier. Certainly a number of very large organizations have massive archive tiers but this now is being adopted or considered as an important project in companies of all sizes. This is further evidence that data center optimization needs to be a top priority - especially in 2009.
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