EMC claims to ‘Boost’ Data Domain deduplication speed by 50 percent
Wednesday, May 12, 2010 14:17EMC announced at its annual user conference here on Tuesday a new software add-on that it claims increases the performance of its Data Domain appliance by an average of 50 percent.
Data Domain’s new Boost software, which achieves the speed increase by offloading parts of its deduplication process to backup servers and thereby freeing up CPU cycles, now only works with Symantec’s NetBackup and Backup Exec backup software.
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However, EMC plans to integrate the add-on with its own NetWorker software in the second half of this year.
While offloading “fingerprinting,” or the ability to identify duplicate data, to a data center’s backup server sounds counterintuitive, EMC said moving those functions to the media server means it, in turn, will send less data across the LAN to the Data Domain appliance. This reduces both the LAN bandwidth and appliance processing requirements.
The Boost feature on a Data Domain appliance can reduce backup traffic on the LAN by 80 percent to 90 percent, said PK Gupta, EMC’s director of backup recovery systems for Asia, Pacific, and Japan operations. As an example, EMC said a flagship Data Domain DD880 appliance’s throughput increases to 8.8TB per hour with the Boost feature, from 5.4TB when the appliance was first introduced.
“The integration of backup software with deduplication storage is not just about enhancing performance; it’s about increasing functionality to enable a more streamlined and sophisticated user experience,” said Laura DuBois, a program director for storage software at research firm IDC.
PK Gupta, EMC’s director of backup recovery systems for Asia, Pacific, and Japan operations, admitted that until now, Data Domain’s deduplication appliance has been better integrated with competing backup software, “but that story is changing.”
Gupta said Boost would be available for EMC’s own Networker backup software later this year affording functions such as auto discovery, auto configuration, monitoring, and reporting, which “are much better integrated with NetWorker than NetBackup.”
Once integrated with NetWorker, the backup software will also be able to manage backups that are deduplicated by EMC’s Avamar deduplication software, which is already integrated with NetWorker.
Prior to purchasing Data Domain last year, EMC already had a deduplication product that was integrated with NetWorker. EMC’s Avamar software deduplication product, which it purchased in 2006.
