Enterprise Storage Forum content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Data deduplication has been just about the hottest thing in data storage technology over the last year or so, saving users a bundle in storage costs by eliminating duplicate data.
Just ask NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), which said last night that it will pay $1.5 billion to buy the early leader in the space, Data Domain (NASDAQ: DDUP).
But while Data Domain may have pioneered the dedupe market, others have since followed, and now it’s hard to find a storage vendor that doesn’t offer the technology.
Dedupe technology has also begun to find uses outside of VTL and disk backup strategies. A few vendors, led by NetApp, have added it to primary storage.
And it’s become almost required for replication offerings, as the technology can save users a whole lot on bandwidth costs.
Sepaton this week became the latest dedupe vendor to add the technology to replication, following the likes of Data Domain and EMC (NYSE: EMC).
Sepaton, like Data Domain, is using an appliance approach, with a central appliance in the data center and smaller units at remote sites.
The high-end dedupe vendor and HP (NYSE: HPQ) OEM partner said its new DeltaRemote software can reduce replication bandwidth requirements by as much as 97 percent. The software is priced at $11,000 per node, and each Sepaton node can deduplicate as much as 25TB of data per day.
Jay Livens, Sepaton’s director of marketing, said his company’s architecture has an edge in high-end deployments because of the scalability of its node architecture. He also claims the best performance in the industry, with ingestion, deduplication and replication all occurring at the same time.
Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Lauren Whitehouse said there are many ways to measure deduplication performance, including inline vs. post-processing, bigger systems vs. more streams, connectivity speeds, and even the use of Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) NetBackup OST API interface.
“So it’s not always an apples-to-apples comparison,” Whitehouse said. “I don’t doubt that the vendors can demonstrate the throughput performance they claim, but what’s behind the numbers?”
Still, she gives high marks for performance to Sepaton, IBM (NYSE: IBM), NEC and FalconStor (NASDAQ: FALC).
Follow Enterprise Storage Forum on Twitter
