Diligent Provides Backup’s ‘Missing Link’

Diligent Technologies revealed this week why top-tier venture capitalists were willing to shell out so much cash last year for a product they had yet to see.

Boasting gaudy numbers both in performance and cost-savings, Diligent unveiled its ProtecTIER platform and HyperFactor factoring technology with claims that the technology can eliminate redundant data and decrease the amount of required storage by more than 95 percent.

Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said Diligent’s technology goes beyond virtual tape technology by increasing the time that data can be kept on line.

“Diligent ProtecTIER platform with HyperFactor gives customers the ability to keep data on line, on disk forever almost — which means recovery can happen in real time and the economic savings can be enormous,” Duplessie said. “This has been the missing link in the total required disk-based solution.”

Diligent CEO Doron Kempel said the company is “winning nine out of 10” deals against big-name rivals like IBM and StorageTek, with a customer list that includes Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo and Vanguard.

Diligent product goes further than rivals by eliminating redundant data, said Kempel and CTO Neville Yates. It also deploys easily and scales to address a jaw-dropping 25 petabytes of data (1PB of physical storage) — the company’s biggest customers are using only 600TB now and moving the rest to tape after a few weeks, Yates and Kempel say. The company also claims 100% data integrity, 200MB/sec throughput per node, and a 250,000 to 1 index to repository ratio that the company says reduces required storage by 25:1, hence 25PB of data on 1PB of physical storage.

Diligent’s software costs $40,000-190,000 without commodity hardware. At that price, Diligent says it is 10 percent to 40 percent cheaper than tape, with a lower total cost of ownership too, thanks to bandwidth, management, personnel and space savings. The company plans compression, vaulting, replication and encryption in future offerings.

“We are the first to eliminate the economic barriers that have been previously associated with deploying comprehensive disk-based data protection solutions without compromising performance, scalability and 100% data-integrity,” boasts Kempel.

The first access module for the ProtecTIER platform is ProtecTIER VT, a virtual tape solution for open systems. ProtecTIER VT emulates tape libraries, enabling existing backup applications to send data to the ProtecTIER platform instead of tape.

“I’ve carefully worked through the TCO for ProtecTIER and am amazed at what I see,” states Michael Peterson, president of Strategic Research Corporation. “ProtecTIER VT empowers disk with a myriad of cost saving and operational benefits around protection and recovery which result in more than $15,000 per TB per year of cost savings compared to tape automation.”

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