Opinion

posted on 12 May 2008 16:37

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EMC thinks that Data Domain's performance comparisons between its new DD690 and EMC Avamar's RAIN Grid product are irrelevant and designed to confuse.

An EMC spokesperson said: "Once again, Data Domain is intentionally trying to confuse the industry and attempting to compete with EMC in a way that's irrelevant to how our EMC Avamar solution works."

Accrding to EMC, Avamar moves data at 10 GB/hr per node (moving unique sub-file data only). Avamar reduces typical file system data by 99.7 percent or more, so only 0.3 percent is moved daily in comparison to the amount that Data Domain has to move in conjunction with traditional backup software. This equals a 333x reduction compared to a traditional full backup (Avamar has customer data indicating as much as 500X, but 333X is a good average).

Given this reduction rate, Avamar's effective throughput is 10 GB/hr x 333 = 3.3 TB/hr per node. With RAIN, Avamar performance scales linearly with the number of Avamar nodes in the grid. With 16 Avamar nodes (a fully populated, single rack EMC Avamar Data Store) the effective throughput is 53 TB/hr.

The spokesperson said: "Remember that Data Domain has to move all of the data to the box, so naturally they're focusing on getting massive amounts of data in quickly. EMC Avamar never has to move all of that data, so instead we focus on de-dupe efficiency, high-availability and ease of restore. Attributes that are more meaningful to the customer concerned with effective backup operations. "

EMC says Data Domain continues to compare apples and oranges because it wants to avoid the discussion that there are a number of different backup solutions that fit a variety of unique customer use cases.

The spokesperson summed it up this way: "Data Domain wants you to believe that one size fits all. It's a classic way for vendors like Data Domain - who are pigeonholed by their own hype and marketing - to create confusing numbers and technology-driven dialogue since they can not talk from a broad backup portfolio and solutions perspective."

^{[Chris Mellor.]}