Storage budgets are suffering the current economic climate, but that doesn't mean storage spending is on hold. The onus is now on doing more with less, and one key technology that can help is data deduplication.
It's a technology that has matured over the past year, and investing in it can bring huge savings. By reducing the amount of data that needs to be backed up and stored by 20:1 and more, data deduplication can save on bandwidth and storage media. It can also allow for a massive increase in the efficiency of data restores by allowing backups to be retained on disk for far longer.
But there are a large number of deduplication products on the market, with many key differences. Things to consider during the procurement stage include whether to choose a hardware or software data dedupe product; should dedupe be part of a virtual tape library (VTL) or a NAS subsystem; does it use in-line or post-process features; is dedupe done at the source or target; and should you use SHA-1 or MD5 as your data redundancy elimination algorithm.
We answer all of these questions for the key dedupe product vendors in the following chart. For a comprehensive guide to data deduplication products, see the SearchStorageUK data deduplication special report.
Vendor |
Hardware or software? |
VTL, NAS, etc. |
Algorithm used |
Inline or post-process |
Source or target |
Copan Systems Inc. |
Hardware |
VTL and NAS |
SHA-1 |
Post-process |
Target |
Data Domain Inc. |
Hardware |
VTL and NAS |
SHA-1 |
Inline |
Target |
Dell EqualLogic |
Certified ExaGrid gateway for EqualLogic systems |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
Diligent Technologies Corp. (an IBM company) |
Software |
VTL |
Custom |
In-line |
Target |
EMC Corp. |
Hardware |
VTL, NAS, SAN attached |
SHA-1 and MD5 |
Post-process |
Target |
EMC/Avamar |
Software |
-- |
SHA-1 and MD5 |
In-line |
Source |
ExaGrid Systems Inc. |
Hardware |
NAS |
Post-process |
Target |
|
FalconStor Software Inc. |
Hardware and software |
VTL and NAS |
SHA-1 with optional MD5 |
Post-process |
Target |
Fujitsu |
Uses EMC/Avamar software |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
Hewlett-Packard Co. |
Hardware |
VTL |
SHA-1 |
In-line |
Target |
Hitachi Data Systems |
Uses Diligent ProtecTier |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
NetApp |
Software (in OS) |
NAS/SAN |
Custom |
In-line and post-process |
Target and source |
Overland Storage Inc. |
Hardware |
VTL |
Custom |
In-line |
Target |
Pillar Data Systems |
Uses Data Domain, Diligent, FalconStor, Symantec |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
Quantum Corp. |
Hardware and software |
VTL and NAS |
MD5 |
In-line and post-process |
Target |
Sepaton Inc. |
Software |
VTL |
Custom |
Post-process |
Target |
Spectra Logic Corp. |
Uses FalconStor software |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
Sun Microsystems Inc. |
Uses FalconStor software |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
Symantec Corp. |
Software |
-- |
SHA-1 |
In-line |
Source |
