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EMC (NYSE: EMC) has added cascaded replication to its Data Domain deduplication appliances, adding an extra layer of data protection for enterprises seeking greater resilience for their data centers.
Cascaded replication allows Data Domain appliances to replicate to multiple sites that have Data Domain appliances, instead of replicating to just a single site or cross-replicating between sites.
That gives larger distributed enterprises the ability to create additional recovery sites and design more comprehensive disaster recovery strategies to protect critical data. An EMC spokesperson called the feature “very desirable” for those organizations.
Data Domain Replicator software also gets new features aimed at large organizations, including support for up to 180-to-1 remote site fan-in to a single controller for the high-end DD880 and as much as a 100 percent boost in directory replication throughput using optimized, multi-stream replication. Using the fan-in feature requires only the software and a line to move data on.
Deduplication has become a must-have feature for data replication, as the technology saves on bandwidth and storage costs and time (see Sepaton Adds Dedupe to Data Replication and IBM Uses Replication, Dedupe to Cut Data Recovery Costs).
EMC, which is keeping the Data Domain brand name after acquiring the company in a bidding war with NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), says the combination of high-speed inline deduplication, cross-site dedupe and simultaneous vaulting of data offsite also means faster disaster recovery times for users.
Brian Babineau, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said replication for offsite data protection was the top storage spending priority for enterprises in the firm’s 2009 spending survey.
“It is clear that companies want to shift from transporting backup tapes as the primary means of moving data between multiple sites so long as they can find an affordable disk alternative,” Babineau said in a statement. The new Data Domain features increase the number of remote sites that can be protected by disk, he added.
Data Domain appliances support CIFS and NFS fileserver over Ethernet, virtual tape library (VTL) over Fibre Channel, and the OpenStorage interface from rival backup provider Symantec’s (NASDAQ: SYMC) Veritas NetBackup.
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