Sepaton Turns Virtual Tape Up a Notch

Sepaton unveiled a new high-end virtual tape library (VTL) appliance today that the company claims bests its competitors in capacity and performance.

The S2100-ES2 Series 1000 VTL also comes with new software, improved de-duplicationperformance and scalability.

The new VTL platform includes 1TB disk drives, increasing density by a third, and scales to 1.6 petabytes of usable capacity. The company claims a 50 to 1 data reduction ratio with de-deduplication and compression.

The products will be demonstrated this week at Symantec Vision 08 in Las Vegas.

Sepaton CTO Miklos Sandorfi said the company’s DeltaStor tunable de-duplication software offers “concurrent processing,” with de-dupe speeds of 800MB/sec — four times that of competitors, he claims. The company had one customer that reached its previous performance limit, so the new version doubles it to as much as 9600MB/sec.

The company also boosted restore performance by making sure the newest data is restored quickest.

Future plans include search and indexing and other compliance and e-discovery features, part of what marketing vice president Asim Zaheer calls “a holistic vision for how data is managed from cradle to grave.”

Michael Grillo, principal engineer at Foxwoods Resort Casino and a Sepaton customer since 2005, isn’t interested in how Sepaton measures up against the competition — he’s Sepaton’s customer to lose.

“I’ve been nothing but happy with them,” he said. The ES2-2100 has served the company well over the last three years, he said, handling the casino’s greater than 50 percent growth rate with ease.

Grillo is looking forward to Sepaton’s new denser arrays manufactured by Dot Hill. And he also likes Sepaton’s ability to work with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager.

Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Lauren Whitehouse gives Sepaton high marks for its grid-based architecture.

“It allows them to scale both storage capacity and performance non-disruptively,” she said. “They’ve recently added data de-duplication support, the new ‘must have’ for disk backup strategies as it changes the economics of backup to disk. Sepaton’s approach de-dupes the data after it’s written to disk, allowing backup to the VTL to occur at impressive rates, while also allowing for significant de-duplication of data — upwards of a 50X de-dupe ratio.”

Greg Schulz, senior analyst and founder of StorageIO, said VTLs “remain a key enabling technology for bridging the gap between legacy physical tape and associated software stickiness, and the rapidly evolving disk-based backup data protection approaches.”

And de-duplication plays a central role in those VTL deployments, he said.

“With each passing generation and technology update, VTLs remain viable as a mainstream data protection technique, enabling large-scale enterprise environments to start to look into use of de-dupe along with compression to reduce data footprints for mission-critical scenarios, which is good news for vendors like Data Domain, EMC, FalconStor, IBM, NetApp, Sepaton and Quantum, among others,” said Schulz.

Pricing for the Sepaton S2100-ES2 Series 1000 Rack Ready starts at $69,000 for 10TB of usable capacity.

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