Data Domain makes remote office data deduplication push

Data Domain Inc. is sharpening its focus on remote office backup. The company is rolling out its smallest data deduplication appliance with replication for enterprises that want to consolidate data from branch offices into a central data center. Data Domain today launched the DD120, its smallest data deduplication appliance in terms of both footprint and capacity. But the DD120 isn't the company's first appliance for remote offices. Its DD510 and DD530 are also used in remote settings, but the new model is the only one with Data Domain Replicator software bundled and is designed for smaller data sets. @47976 Data Domain marketing vice president Beth White said she expects the DD120 to be used mostly by current Data Domain customers looking to replace tape backup in remote offices. "This was born from customer demand from enterprise customers with smaller remote sites and tape autoloaders out there," she said. "They want to be able to back up and recover from disk at the remote locations." White said the DD120 handles larger data sets than most WAFS appliances, but smaller data sets than the DD510 and DD530. Data Domain claims the DD120 supports up to 320 remote sites. The DD120 is a 1U dual-core appliance with 750 GB of disk that Data Domain projects can store from 7 TB to 18 TB of deduplicated data. It provides inline throughput of 150 GB per hour. The next smallest Data Domain appliance, the DD510, holds 3.75 TB of physical capacity with a throughput of 290 GB per hour. The DD120's starting list price of $12,500 includes replication. The DD510 starts at $19,000, and replication licenses begin at $3,500. The DD120 is the only Data Domain product not available as a virtual tape library (VTL). It supports NFS and CIFS protocols, and the Symantec Veritas NetBackup OpenStorage interface. IDC analyst Laura DuBois said organizations are looking to improve the backup process at remote offices where storage management expertise is often lacking. "Remote tape management practiced by secretaries and administrators is getting pulled out," she said. "Companies are figuring out how they want to do it. They're looking at replication or backup to disk, but without a doubt, they want to do it centrally." Is scaling up next? While backing up data at remote sites is something organizations have paid more attention to in recent years, the large enterprise is generally seen as the next big battlefield for data deduplication. It is there where Data Domain's rivals hope to chip away at its dominant market share. FalconStor Software Inc. added support for larger clusters in its VTL5 software last month and Quantum Corp. expects to make its DXi7500 enterprise system available by midyear with support for multiple nodes and both inline and post-processing deduplication. Sepaton Inc. and Diligent Technologies Corp. also have enterprise VTLs with data deduplication. "Data deduplication was adopted early in small enterprises and the midmarket, but definitely this is a big topic in the enterprise now," DuBois said. "We do CIO-level interviews with enterprise firms, and data deduplication increasingly comes up as a requirement." White said Data Domain customers can scale by adding expansion shelves or controllers but she acknowledged many enterprises will require clustered systems with a single namespace. She said Data Domain expects to have appliances that scale in that manner, but gave no timeframe. "You'll see us going after that space like everybody is trying to," White said. "Those big data centers don't have a broad deployment of deduplication yet, there's a lot of tire kicking going on. Everybody's trying to get there now."