This is a discussion that I had with Eric Hawley, associate vice president and Orrin Anderson, system administrator for Utah State University. The discussion was much longer and will be available in a full report but I wanted to give you some highlights of that discussion:
Tony Asaro: Why did you decide to implement a disk-to-disk back-up solution that supports data de-duplication?
Eric Hawley: To answer that question, I'd like to share with you the experience that we encountered that let us know how urgently we needed deduplication technology. How we typically do it is we back up directly to disk - our ERP systems. We use SCT banner and our enterprise directory and email and file systems. And we use Microsoft products for those - Microsoft Exchange for email - Microsoft Active Directory for our file sharing. We use CommVault for our back-up solution. We moved things to a 35 terabyte Dell EMC storage area network (SAN). And we move it primarily to disk because we have such large amounts of data that sending it to tape just takes too long.
What we were finding is that those 35 terabytes would allow us to back up only two or three days' worth of our back-up sets on that disk. We found that that was not enough time to get things transferred over to tape in a timely manner.
We knew immediately we had a couple of choices. One, we could go buy more disks. Not cheap, especially when you're dealing with storage area networks and enterprise storage. Even though we're using lower tier storage back-up doesn’t require super fast tier one, but that was going to cost money. Around about this time J.D. Parody from Data Domain was in contact with us. We'd had a great relationship with him through his previous employer as well, and he talked to us a little bit about Data Domain and data deduplication, and showed us conservatively that we could expect a minimum of a 10 times data deduplication, which is just perfect for back-up.
We started figuring if we had 10 times our 35-terabyte array - would suddenly start looking like 350 terabytes of space looking at a minimum 10 times deduplication rate, which to us, was very appealing.
Tony Asaro: What was the process you used to make your final decision to go with Data Domain?
Eric Hawley: As we were looking at what we wanted, and we were looking at cost, we were looking at outcome, meaning we've got to have more space for less cost, and we were looking at performance. When you look at data de-duplication, we needed something that would be able to do it in real time, and not all the vendors out there who were looking at, who were doing data deduplication, were able to do it in real time. We looked at three factors. We looked at the price.
The ability of the Data Domain solution to keep up in real time was necessary. We wanted to make sure that the solution was transparent meaning we don't want to have to change our CommVault back-up solution. We don't want to have to change our [backup] windows or our methods that we used to back up. We just want to stick this thing in between that storage area network and our back-up services and have the back-up set where really never have a clue that everything was being de-duplicated.
Tony Asaro: Can you give us any examples of how Data Domain provided real value to your company?
Orrin Anderson: What we had before we bought the Data Domain box - we did our disk-to-disk back-up straight to a about a 30-terabyte SAN - we ran out of space on a lot sooner than we thought we would. We ended up buying the Data Domain 690G, the gateway, and put it in front of that existing SAN and so far, we've tripled the amount of data - over tripled from 30 terabytes - to a little over 100 terabytes of data that we have on there - and it's still not full yet. Just in that, it has expanded the capability of our current SAN above and beyond what it was meant to do.
Tony Asaro: Can you tell us how Data Domain has improved the overall economic effectiveness within your IT operations?
Eric Hawley: It cost us less than buying more hard drives. That was the economic gain. But the economic gain was not our primary reason. Our primary reason was the functional gain. Our back-ups were failing. If anything goes wrong - and things go wrong in technology - those back-ups still have to occur. Data Domain solved that functional problem for us at less cost than doing it the traditional way.
Orrin Anderson: Like I said our SAN was fully populated. If we wanted to expand the amount of data that we could copy disk-to-disk, we'd either have to buy a larger, more expensive SAN - or a couple more of these smaller SANs. Either of which would have cost up in the hundreds of thousands. Buying the Data Domain gateway, we continue using the SAN that we had already purchased and paid for, where it wouldn't go to waste, but also expand its capability so that we wouldn't have to buy an additional SAN.
We don't have to manage the Data Domain box very much. Once we got it set up, it was pretty much just a set it up and let it do its thing. Every once in awhile I check on it, but it does save me time in having to monitor an extra box.
Tony Asaro: Did you look at any other disk-based back-up or VTL solutions?
Orrin Anderson: We used the CommVault back-up system, and I was at CommVault training in California and asked the other IT professionals what they were doing. About 75% of them were using Data Domain boxes, whether it be a gateway or a full box. Just seeing that 75% of them were using and were happy with the box, really made us look at Data Domain. After we did that, we didn't really consider much of anything else.
Tony Asaro: Did you look at software-based solutions provided by the back-up vendors?
Orrin Anderson: No, we didn't. Mainly because we wanted something that wasn't going to bog down our servers - that wasn't going to cause any additional overhead. We wanted something that would handle the deduplication on its end. We do have some servers that wouldn't be able to handle too much extra processing on their part.
Tony Asaro: Would you recommend using Data Domain to other IT professionals? And tell us why.
Orrin Anderson: I definitely would recommend it. When I was at the training for my back-up system, about 75% of the people there were also using it in part of their back-up system. And we weren't disappointed as we implemented it in ours. Once we got it set up, it's easy to manage. You hardly have to touch it. If you want to make some changes, they're quite easy, whether it be through the command line or the web interface. And just that ease of use and not having to worry about - is it up today, or did something take it down - is a load off my mind and gives me time to worry about other things - not have to worry about one more box to manage.
