The Next Generation Deduplication Appliance is Here

- Eric Bassier, Director of Data Protection Product Marketing, Quantum, says:

Deduplication technology is maturing, but the market continues to grow.  The deduplication appliance market is expected to grow by about 20% a year for the next three years, and expected to be a $5 billion market by 2015 according to industry analyst IDC.

Companies are investing in deduplication as a means to reduce their backup windows and improve their restore SLAs, but also because it makes replication viable as a disaster recovery strategy. When only a small percentage of the original data size needs to be replicated, then disk-to-disk or disk-to-cloud replication becomes more viable for storing another copy of data in a different location. With newer backup application technologies that make it easier and quicker to restore replicated data and return to business continuance, the lines between backup and disaster recovery are starting to blur.

There are a number of approaches companies can choose for deploying deduplication.  Appliance-based deduplication solutions continue to grow and dominate the market because they offer the best choice for ease of integration, and ensure that the ‘background tasks’ associated with deduplicating data are handled in a way that does not unexpectedly disrupt IT operations.  Background tasks associated with deduplication can include space reclamation, as well as managing the deduplication block pool the big pool of ‘deduplicated’ data blocks. A dedicated appliance can use processing power to complete these tasks when the appliance is not busy with ingesting, replicating, or restoring data.

Optimizing the Data Center with a Faster, More Scalable Deduplication Appliance

The capabilities delivered by faster processors and higher density disk drives continue to race against the realities of increasing data storage requirements. New hardware components have their own challenges that need to be solved to meet customers’ expectations around availability and performance. 

Quantum’s new DXi6800 series deduplication appliances are built on a hardware architecture using 3 TB drives to reduce their data center footprint and power consumption.  By combining a purpose-built appliance architecture with Quantum’s patented variable-length, inline deduplication and high performance file system technology, the DXi6800 is able to deliver best-in-class ingest performance, as well as new features designed to improve system availability - even while benefitting from the improved density of 3 TB drives.  Another benefit of 3 TB drives is improved density and efficiency.  The DXi6800 manages to provide 3PB of capacity in just 14U of rack space – requiring half the data center footprint and power consumption of the market leader. The DXi6800 is also designed to be extremely scalable, enabling customers to maintain their investment in the DXi6800 as their data grows using a unique license-based, pay-as-you-grow approach to capacity expansion. Further, the self-encrypting drives in the DXi6800 offer hardware-based encryption both for data at rest and data in flight, without the incurring the performance penalty typically found with software based approaches. 

The DXi6800 is setting a high-water mark for performance and scalability. If the initial surge of early customer purchases and deployments in advance of the recent announcement is any indication, it’s an advancement the industry has been waiting for.