Features - Storage Innovations:

DATA DOMAIN DELIVERS BREAKTHROUGH DISK-BASED RECOVERY

Data Domain has announced a storage industry breakthrough in protection, simplicity, and reliability with its new disk-based recovery storage solution, the DD200 Recovery Appliance and the Data Domain Restore Protection Manager (DD RPM) software. Designed from the ground up to support existing backup software, the DD200 is the industry's first disk-based recovery appliance to combine full recoverability verification with speed and cost-optimization for recovery data. Combined with the DD RPM software, this Data Domain appliance makes restore and backup functions faster, simpler, and dramatically more reliable than existing solutions, at a cost competitive with tape automation.

Designed by renowned experts from Network Appliance and Princeton University, the DD200 Recovery Appliance's integrated hardware and software components represent breakthrough technology advancements. DD RPM includes the first production file system software to offer proactive, end-to-end data consistency and integrity verification -- providing the highest level of protection for data recovery in the industry. With its innovative Global Compression technology, the DD RPM software requires an order of magnitude fewer disks to store backup data than conventional ATA RAID backup solutions. By supporting leading standard backup packages such as Veritas NetBackup and Legato Networker, DD RPM also eliminates disruption in the data center. Designed for resilience, the Data Domain solution enables months of data backups to be kept cost-effectively on disks instead of in remote tape libraries, allowing faster, onsite, online recoveries.

"Backup-and-restore represents the largest single expense in the total cost of ownership of storage," said Nick Allen, vice president and research director, Gartner Inc. "However, backup-and-restore is also the least reliable link in the storage ecosystem. In the future, most restores will be from disk, not tape."

"There are two key components to Documentum's backup strategy: One is recovering from major disasters, which is why we take tapes off-site; the other is recovering from the small, daily disasters of accidental file deletion or corruption. In the latter case, it is critical that we recover files quickly and easily without going to off-site storage or searching through tape archives," said Jeff Ward, director of IT services at Documentum. "We are pleased with Data Domain's strategy in the area of rapid recovery, and we are actively testing this solution in our primary data center. Data Domain's appliance is easy to deploy and use, so our pilot project has not required a significant investment of time and resources."

Proactive, Continuous Verification of Data Recoverability

DD RPM was designed from the ground up to focus on protecting recovery copies. With primary storage, the design center focuses on block I/O response time; in contrast, DD RPM includes the first production file system to have an architecture designed and optimized for data protection. If a normal file system is used for recovery storage and a consistency problem occurs, that problem isn't apparent until someone attempts to restore a file -- the worst time to discover that data is unreachable. After storing a recovery copy, DD RPM verifies end-to-end that the data on disk is reachable and correct at the time of the backup. DD RPM then repeats consistency checking and data self-healing continuously in the background. With its custom append-only file system, DD RPM also protects against erroneous block overwrites and many of the other software faults that can cause silent data loss in conventional storage systems.

Global Compression and Redundancy Pooling: Lower Costs, Less to Manage

Over a typical four-month time frame, the DD RPM patent-pending Global Compression technology reduces the size of recovery copies by an average of 20 times versus traditional backup storage, lowering the costs of purchasing and managing storage significantly. Even with highly protective mirroring RAID and spares, a DD200 appliance with just 16 disks can hold up to 23 TB of recovery data.

With DD RPM Global Compression, the backup data stream is broken into variable-length segments that are smaller than the average block; DD RPM stores to disk only the segments that have not been stored before, pooling redundancies. This content-based scheme identifies changes below and across blocks, independent of backup software formats or client data type. The Global Compression technology applies equally well to file systems, databases, and email. The DD RPM software is optimized for enterprise backup data -- data that changes incrementally day to day. Operating an order of magnitude faster than standard software compression, the DD200 with DD RPM Global Compression averages more than 150 GB per hour throughput.

"Data Domain is offering a product that fits conservatively in the enterprise, where backup has to evolve," said Steve Kenniston, senior analyst, Enterprise Storage Group. "The company has designed a storage appliance for standard backup software that offers a new level of data protection while being both simple to install and deploy. If it wasn't clear that tape automation would be challenged by disk-based solutions, it is crystal clear starting now. Data Domain's solution has the capability to deliver a solid ROI from disk and tape savings, as well as enterprise reliability and faster recovery times."

"The biggest factors contributing to rising storage costs are tape technology and its administration," said Kai Li, CTO of Data Domain. "With DD RPM and the disk-based DD200 appliance, Data Domain is on a mission to make recovery operations much more reliable, simpler, and cost-effective for users of standard backup software."

Improves Operation of Standard Backup Software

The DD200 appliance currently supports Veritas NetBackup and Legato Networker; support for other standard backup software will follow. Using the DD200 improves the performance and reliability of these widely installed products. For example, employing their user-driven restore clients, end users can safely recover files on their own, without requiring administrator intervention -- something that is rarely if ever possible with tape automation. The DD200 is also optimized to support simultaneous backups-and-restores and simultaneous slow backup client streams. It connects to Unix- or Linux-based backup media servers using NFS V3; CIFS support for NT-based media servers will be available in 2004.

DD200 and DD RPM Availability, Pricing, and Capacity

Data Domain's DD200 Recovery Appliance and the DD RPM software will be generally available in the second half of 2003. List price for the 4U rackmount unit is $58,000 per unit for 23 TB of recovery copy storage, or about $2.50 per GB of protected capacity. This price includes the DD200 system with sixteen 250-GB ATA disks at $25,300 and the DD RPM software licensed to run on the DD200, including the NFS V3 protocol, at $32,700. A single DD200 is configured to back up from 0.5 TB to 1.5 TB of primary storage for months of retention; more units may be applied to the backup server for additional bandwidth or capacity.