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Data Domain (NASDAQ: DDUP) is unveiling a new data deduplication appliance that slashes the price for its highest-end features by more than a third.
The new DD660 is based on Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) quad-core chips, like the high-end DD690. And while it doesn’t have quite the performance or the data storage capacity of the DD690, the DD660 also costs $75,000 less.
For $130,000, the DD660 offers 12TB of data storage capacity, compared to 16TB for the $205,000 DD690. But DD690 users also get 35 percent more performance and capacity, processing as much as 2.7TB of backup and archive data an hour and turning 48TB of raw capacity into 710TB to 1.7 petabytes of logical capacity, thanks to dedupe ratios of as much as 50:1.
The DD660 replaces the DD580, which was based on dual-core chips and cost $120,000 for 7.5TB with half the throughput. For $10,000 more, the DD690 offers users quite a bit more for their money.
Data Domain’s “CPU-centric” architecture gives the company’s NAS and VTL appliances a big boost from CPU performance, multithreading and software improvements, said Brian Biles, company co-founder and vice president of product management.
He expects a “pretty big improvement” from Intel’s Nehalem chips, which the company is working with in the lab but doesn’t expect to offer in products until next year.
Biles said the price-performance improvements offered in the DD660 reflect the company’s “waterfall down” approach to product development, as high-end improvements move down the product line to midrange and small business users.
The appliances also offer support for copper and optical 10GbE and 1TB SATAdrives.
“Data Domain is really pushing the performance envelope, and if there was any question before of them being able to go after enterprise business without a global deduplication repository, I’d say this has put it to bed,” said Taneja Group analyst Eric Burgener. “Now they can go after enterprise business with their midrange product.”
The most important feature for enterprises is high deduplication performance, said Burgener, and several vendors are now capable of 500MB/sec performance with just a single dedupe box. The highest single-stream throughput tends to come from products that use a global dedupe repository, like IBM’s TS7650, but Burgener noted that “for most of these products, you’re dumping data into it across an IP network, which will limit the performance anyway.”
The products that need the highest performance are the ones that have Fibre Channel interfaces, which tend to be configured as VTLs, he said. “In that case, you could actually have a network infrastructure that can deliver data at greater than 1GB/sec, so you could actually use backup performance in that range,” said Burgener. While the DD660’s 750MB/sec speed comes close to that, “there aren’t a lot of workloads even in VTL environments that would require greater than 1GB/sec.”
Data Domain also works with a wide range of backup, archiving, database and Virtualizationofferings, including those from EMC (NYSE: EMC), Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC), IBM (NYSE: IBM), CommVault (NASDAQ: CVLT), LaserVault, Atempo, Arkivio, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), SAP (NYSE: SAP), VMware (NYSE: VMW), Vizioncore and Luminex.
