Home > Data Backup News > Semiconductor firm turns to Diligent deduplication
Data Backup News:
EMAIL THIS LICENSING & REPRINTS

Semiconductor firm turns to Diligent deduplication

By Dave Raffo, News Director
04 Apr 2008 | SearchDataBackup.com

Enterprise IT news roundup
Digg This!    StumbleUpon Toolbar StumbleUpon    Bookmark with Delicious Del.icio.us    Add to Google

After Magnum Semiconductor Inc. acquired LSI Corp.'s consumer products group last summer, it found itself with almost seven times as much data to back up to tape as it had previously.

John Wunder, Magnum's director of IT, realized soon after acquisition that the company couldn't make its backup window using tape.

"When we bought a division of LSI, we brought over a 17 TB data set," Wunder said. "We had 3 TB before that. We were using two technologies, LTO-3 and an older one, SDLT. Backing up to tape was slow but sufficient with 3 TB, but with the LSI data it wasn't even close."

What's an IT director to do? Dedupe, of course.

More on disk-based backup
EMC, Quantum form deduplication tag team against Data Domain 

IBM reportedly in talks to buy VTL vendor Diligent Technologies

HDS ships VTL bundles with Diligent deduplication  

FalconStor clusters VTL data deduplication
"I've been in this industry for 20 years, and this has been a problem the whole time," Wunder said. "Backing up to tape, even with small data sets, ends up running into the production window and causing problems. Going to tape just isn't efficient, running at 80 MBps and below in the real world."

Wunder said he had been keeping his eye on data deduplication for a while and checked out products from Data Domain and Seagate Technologies subsidiary EVault, but he didn't think they scaled well enough to help.

Magnum goes VTL route

Systems integrator Intellistore then put together a system for Magnum consisting of a Quatrio Pivot 300 virtual tape library (VTL) with Diligent Technologies ProtectTier data deduplication software. Magnum also upgraded to Symantec's NebBackup 6.5.

Wunder said he gets from 10-1 to 20-1 deduplication ratios, depending on the type of data. "I had not investigated Diligent until Intellistore introduced me," he said. "I was significantly impressed with their technology. My first reaction was, 'Wow, what a big difference [from tape].' This is something I've been waiting for – bit-level compression -- so I can get my data set shrunk as much as possible so I can do something with it. Now we do backups at night and during the day get it off to tape."

Fortunately for Wunder, he didn't have to sell upper management on a new backup plan. But he did have to figure out a plan that significantly cut the backup window without significantly stretching the budget.

"I started at Magnum on Nov. 5," he said. "On Nov. 12, our executive team realized our backup system wasn't good and asked me to come up with a new one yesterday. They didn't understand [at the time of the LSI deal] the amount of time it would take to back up traditionally with tape."

Wunder decided backing up directly to tape was just too slow to seriously consider. Backing up to disk and then replicating off site to another disk array was the fastest and most efficient method and also the most expensive. "I'm too small to be able to afford the bandwidth we would've needed," Wunder said.

Shrinking data while shrinking cost

So he decided to go with a VTL and then move data off to a Quantum LTO-3 tape library. He estimates he saved $300,000 by using the Quatrio/Diligent combination instead of tape, because he would have increased the amount of libraries and tape media. Wunder said a Data Domain appliance would have cost $50,000 more than the Quatrio/Diligent VLT.

The amount of data Magnum stores hasn't leveled off since the LSI acquisition, and Wunder doesn't think it will. He said Magnum's engineers are rapidly filling up the company's NetApp FAS3050c NAS system, and he expects its data store to grow about 50% per year. "We're an engineering site, and engineers are pack rats," he said. "If you have it, they'll write to it."

Wunder still dreams of getting rid of tape completely and expects to do it eventually.

"I'm waiting for Blu-Ray jukeboxes to become more mainstream and for the media costs to come down," he said. "There's no comparison in the amount of data you can store on Blu-Ray than tape. But right now, media costs for Blu-Ray are too expensive."



Sound Off! -   Be the first to post a message to Sound Off!


Tags: Data reduction and deduplicationDisk-based backupRecent data reduction newsRecent disk backup newsVIEW ALL TAGS

Digg This!    StumbleUpon Toolbar StumbleUpon    Bookmark with Delicious Del.icio.us    Add to Google


About Us  |  Contact Us  |  For Advertisers  |  For Business Partners  |  Site Index  |  RSS
SEARCH 
TechTarget provides enterprise IT professionals with the information they need to perform their jobs - from developing strategy, to making cost-effective IT purchase decisions and managing their organizations' IT projects - with its network of technology-specific Web sites, events and magazines.

TechTarget Corporate Web Site  |  Media Kits  |  Reprints  |  Site Map




All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2008, TechTarget | Read our Privacy Policy
  TechTarget - The IT Media ROI Experts