HP Announces Two New Deduplication Products

Steve McCaskill,

HP launches a new wave of dedupe tech to help businesses slim down their storage

HP has announced two new deduplication products for businesses, the B6200 StoreOnce backup system and HP Data Protector Software.

The technologies, unveiled at HP Discover inVienna, are part ofa move towards “federated deduplication” and offer vast improvements over the first wave of deduplication products, the company said.

Federated Deduplication

The B6200 StoreOnce backup system is aimed at large enterprises and HP says it is far quicker than any of its leading competitors. It is capable of backing up and restoring data at speeds of 28 terabytes (TB) per hour, much quicker than previous deduplication technology which sacrificed data recovery speeds for the sake of faster backup times.

Designs range from 48TB to 768TB and deduplication ratios of up to 20:1 or more provide storage of up to ten petaybytes (PB). This makes the technology cheaper to use by up to 20 percent per gigabyte and can be scaled up from a two controller figuration to eight without disruption.

Also forming part of this federated deduplication strategy is HP’s Data Protector Software which allows smaller business to harness the benefits of HP’s StoreOnce technology without having to invest in dedicated hardware.

These businesses can use the technology on existing backup servers or on application servers, lowering costs without affecting performance. HP says that this solution is simply not possible with its competitors because deduplication’s high memory use makes remote application unpractical.

“Visionary Vendor”

HP will also offer consulting services to evaluate clients’ back up environments and efficiency to ensure they are ready to cope with the explosion of data, which affects all sizes of enterprise.

HP claims to be “the most visionary vendor in storage space” and has long been a proponent of deduplication technology, along with rivals EMC and IBM, which has included the technology in its mainframes.

The new deduplication solutions form a converged infrastructure solution, one of the core areas of HP’s business which new CEO Meg Whitman wants to focus on.