Sepaton Doubles Deduplication Performance

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Sepaton recently began shipping two new models in its S2100-ES2 family of disk-based backup systems, which include global data deduplication.

The S2100-ES2 1910 and 2910 will compete primarily with target deduplication systems from IBM (ProtecTier) and EMC (DD 890 and Global Deduplication Array, or GDA), as well as systems from vendors such as Exagrid and NEC.

Sepaton hopes to differentiate the S2100-ES2 1910/2910 in part on performance, and has doubled throughput vs. previous S2100-ES2 systems. The company also introduced a new, 64-bit version of its operating software.

Sepaton officials claim throughput of 1,500MBps per node, and a maximum backup ingest rate of 43.2TB per hour on an eight-node configuration with 10GbE connectivity and Symantec’s NetBackup OpenStorage (OST). Sepaton’s deduplication systems previously supported OST, but not on 10GbE.

“Eight nodes is the qualified maximum configuration today, but we will qualify more nodes – up to 16 – as users require it,” said Linda Mentzer, Sepaton’s VP of product and program management.

For performance comparison, EMC cites 14.7TB per hour throughput for the DD 890 (with Boost software) and 26.3TB per hour for the DD GDA (with Boost).

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) analyst Lauren Whitehouse advises users to closely factor in cost, capacity and performance when comparing single-, dual- and multi-node deduplication systems.

“You might think that a multi-node solution costs more than a single-node solution, but that’s not necessarily the case,” said Whitehouse. “Target deduplication systems are typically licensed based on capacity, so you can figure out a $/GB calculation to do an apples-to-apples comparison. With grid-based solutions, users typically have a choice to license the solution based on performance and capacity, so then you need a $/MB/sec calculation to do an apples-to-apples comparison.”

She adds that multi-node grid architectures, such as Sepaton’s, have potential advantages.

“Modular, multi-node architectures allow users to start with what they need today and seamlessly grow,” says Whitehouse. “There’s no need to over-buy to future-proof the solution or under-buy if budgets are tight and companies are forced to only buy what they need today.”

In addition to the 64-bit operating system and throughput-enhancing OST, the performance improvements in Sepaton’s S2100-ES2 1910/2910 are attributable to an upgrade to Intel’s six-core Westmere processors. Each 2U node includes two processors, four 4Gbps Fibre Channel ports, two 10GbE ports, and 48GB of RAM. The back-end architecture is an 8Gbps Fibre Channel SAN. Users can scale capacity to 1.6PB.

The S2100-ES2 1910 and 2910 are based on Hitachi Data Systems’ AMS 2100 disk arrays, which Sepaton began using last year. The model 1910 has 1TB SATA drives, and the 2910 has 2TB SATA drives.

Other features include support for multi-tenancy in cloud architectures, capacity quotas on a per-pool basis, and data compression in conjunction with global deduplication.

Pricing for the systems starts at $257,500 for a single-node configuration with 12TB of capacity, four 4Gbps Fibre Channel ports and two 10GbE ports.

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