News

posted on 12 February 2008 10:05

HDS has introduced three new virtual tape library (VTL) appliances with Diligent’s de-duplication product included. They are aimed at SME and enterprise customers and are claimed to be the fastest disk-based data protection products available.

 The new models are a combination of HDS’ AMS storage arrays and Diligent’s ProtecTIER inline de-duplication technology:-

- VTL 500M for medium business based on the AMS 500 storage array with a capacity for more than 500TB of backup data. That's actually 8 to 20TB raw capacity. It has a a two socket server with dual-core processors giving it 200MB/sec throughput.

- VTL 1000L enterprise class appliance based on the AMS 1000 array which has multi-processing capabilities. It has a  four socket server with dual core chips. There is 15-30TB raw capacity and a 300MB/sec performance level.

- VTL 1000E enterprise class appliance offering 400MB/sec throughput, which Hitachi says is up to 300 percent faster than competing products. Its de-duped capacity can go beyond a petabyte and is based on 30-50TB of raw drive space.

David Floyer, CTO for CIO consultancy ITCentrix, asserted: “Inline data de-duplication is a superior approach for industrial strength backup and recovery relative to post-processing architectures,” in a criticism of post-processing approaches such as those of Data Domain and FalconStor.

He also criticised hash-based de-dupe technology, saying: “But the real story is that Hitachi’s ProtecTIER technology is far more scalable and ready to meet the coming explosion in data backup requirements than alternative hash-based approaches. For example, our research indicates that customers using ProtecTIER to replace tape-based backup will achieve 31 percent greater savings than best of breed hash-based alternatives."

The new models are said to be affordable; this is a variant of the classic enterprise-features-at-mid-range-prices story. John Mansfield, an HDS SVP for global solutions strategy and development, said: " Hitachi has a proven track record in successfully delivering powerful data de-duplication and data protection services to customers in large scale enterprise deployments. Today, we are making available these enterprise-grade storage services to medium-sized customers with new cost-effective VTL appliances that are easy to implement and easy to manage.”

 For more information, including technical specifications, visit:

http://www.hds.com/products/storage-software/virtual-tape-library.html

 It's to be noted that NetApp has today announced de-duplication is vailable for ordinary disk storage, not just disk-based backup data. Of course there is a disk array performance hit so it's not suitable for primary, tier 1 arrays dealing with fast access production data.