Nexsan Technologies — Green Storage

Deduplication

The Market Demands Improving Efficiency

Economic constraints have a major impact on the operations of data centers.  Focus remains on capital spending reductions and no new labor.  Still, data center complexity continues to grow, as larger amounts of data are stored.

Fortunately, nobody has lost focus; data remains the crown jewel of an enterprise.  It is for that reason that storage administrators purposely replicate data in their protection strategy.  Unfortunately, the by-product of data protection is mass data duplication, leading to compounded cost inefficiencies in storage capacity, power, cooling and floor space.

Addressing these challenges spawned the emergence of data deduplication; a process that searches for duplicate data objects and deletes them to free space.   Deduplication efficiency ratios range from 10-50 to 1, thereby allowing 10TB to 50TB of backup data to be stored on a single terabyte of physical capacity over time.

As capacity requirements are reduced so should capital expenses.  However, first generation deduplication really only shifted dollars spent in existing secondary backup storage to the addition of a new disk appliance used to capture deduplicated backup data.  Shifting expense from one to the other results in the benefit objective being lost.  The real financial benefit from deduplication comes when the enterprise receives both capital and operating expense relief.

To that end, late last year, Nexsan teamed with FalconStor to introduce an evolutionary deduplication system known as Dedupe SG.  Because it addressed issues previously left open, we called it the second generation of deduplication.

Users found that Dedupe SG proved to reduce aggregate capital and operating cost by 50%, floor space by 50%, power by 60%, and yet it is 73% higher performing than competitors.  It is a great accomplishment, to provide twice the efficiency at half the cost, but even with that, there was more that could be achieved.

DeDupe SG 2.0

The second release of Nexsan’s deduplication has arrived and is known as Dedupe SG 2.0. Improvements have been added in several key areas:

Availability

Data availability requirements are continuous, which is why DeDupe SG now offers a “HOT” standby appliance, mirroring the primary production appliance.   Normal for a mirror, if the primary DeDupe SG appliance experiences an outage, the “HOT” standby takes over, ensuring 24×7 availability for the most demanding applications.

Manageability

Dedupe SG 2.0 adds performance and manageability enhancements with the introduction of support from Symantec’s Open Storage Technology (OST).  OST enables NetBackup to be aware of duplicate backup images wherever they are.  Backup data can be managed directly from NetBackup, providing a consolidated view, whether local or remote.  When combining OST in a clustered server environment, a fully synchronized catalogue database can manage multiple locations delivering improved levels of backup and recovery automation.

Performance

Already a great performer, Dedupe SG 2.0 adds performance through OST.  Significant performance gains are further enhanced over new 10-gigabit interfaces.  OST is similar to a network protocol (like NFS/CIFS) without the overhead of the TCP stack with users seeing 1.5 – 2X performance improvements.

Additional landing zone cache has been added to allow larger backups to be captured, also enhancing performance.

Conclusions

As industry trends for storage growth and budget reductions continue, IT needs to do more with less.  Part of the solution is to eliminate mass duplication of files and associated capital expense.  Second-generation deduplication eliminates duplicate data, but uniquely cuts operating expenses by significantly reducing power, cooling, and floor space demand, making it the most significant economically beneficial deduplication system available.

In addition to all the financial benefits, with Dedupe SG 2.0, you can expect even greater performance, and less risk.