Data Domain Soups up its De-duplicating Disk Array

De-dupliocating specialist Data Domain has updated its midrange appliance with a model featuring 1TB hard drives and quad-core Intel Xeon processors.

Companies often have multiple copies of data, created by backup utilities as well as copies of files stored in several staff mailboxes. Removing these copies has become a growth industry, offering users the chance to free up space in data centres and defer the purchase of new disks.

Data Domain claimed that the DD660 offers 50 percent better price/performance and 50 percent more base system capacity than the DD580 that it replaces. The DD660 will cost around $130,000 (£90,000), compared with $120,000 for the previous model, which used dual-core processors.

According to Shane Jackson, Data Domain’s product marketing director, the DD660 gives full rein to a new version of Data Domain’s operating software. This is designed to do more in parallel, so it makes better use of multi-core processors.

“The DD660 can de-duplicate up to 2TB an hour, compared to the DD580 which could do 800GB per hour with the old software, or 1.2TB with the new software,” he said.

That makes it much more practical to save storage by de-duplicating data inline, before it hits the disks, instead of having to store it first and then de-duplicate it offline, said Jackson.

He added that, thanks to the use of 1TB hard drives instead of 500GB drives, the new machine can offer more storage capacity even though it is physically smaller – the base unit is 2U high, where the DD580 was 3U.

Up to 12 drives can be fitted to the base unit, and another 24 added externally. Jackson claimed that with de-duplication, this 36TB of raw capacity could hold as much as 1.3PB of data in practice.

Data Domain said that the new system fits in underneath its top-end DD690, which also uses quad-core chips but offers even more performance and capacity – it can de-duplicate at up to 2.7TB/hour and have up to 48TB of disk.

“The 660 is intended for very large branch offices or mid-sized primary data centres,” Jackson said.