I have been a long time user of EMC’s Data Domain appliances and these are cool de-duplication devices that facilitate your primary use cases of backup and archiving.

Data domain appliances have significantly improved over the years – now with capabilities like DD Bost you can backup serious volumes of data very quickly. I am referring to backing up huge Tb’s of data within a single day here.

At EMCWorld 2014, EMC is announcing DD2200 appliances – these are highly useful devices in the small to midrange enterprises. As an EMCElect I received some valuable information that general users will see over time but the appliances provide great efficiency like performing a backup of 36Tb of data in less than 8 hours. That’s 4.7Tb/hr with DD boost and 3.5 Tb/hr without it. The appliance scales up to 860Tb logical capacity with up to 60 backup/archive streams. Now for a small to midrange environment that’s a lot of streams and offers highly efficient backups.

Way back on May 11, 2010, EMC had first announced DD Boost software. For those that do not know much about DD Boost – it compresses data inline and identifies unique segments or changed blocks. It facilitates very fast backup times since we essentially do not backup everything in that case.  That feature alone boosted the Data Domain capability by around 50% – though personally I would keep its average around the 40% range – reason being practical requirements vary.

The new DD2200 is said to be also integrated with EMC Data Protection suite for <10Tb environments. It integrates directly with VMware and other applications to simply backup and recovery and at the same time reduces backup & archive storage requirements by 10x to 30x.  Now, I like to talk from a technical angle so based on personal experience I would place that at 8x to 25x because de-duplication or storage requirements also vary by type of data and we have to factor in those variables.

A key thing I always look forward to is performance – how the array or de-duplication appliance performs when it is encrypting data or restoring compressed data are the factors that are highly important. Usual marketing documentation does not specify that information – but based on available information I believe we’ll see about 3.5 Tb/hr of data throughput speeds with encryption turned on. The logical capacity varies from 172 to 860 Tb and after data is de-duplicated actual storage footprint is upto 17.2Tb (imagine storing 25x of compressed data on it though) – at conservative figures that’s about 430Tb and plenty for a small to midrange environment. In my view that’s scaling to reach larger enterprise environments.

The IT environments that currently run DD880 can attest to one thing always – Data Domain appliances are highly reliable. The level of failure is very low, support is top notch for the most part, and the configuration is highly flexible. If there is anything you would like to share or provide feedback on please feel free to comment.