EMC doubles de-duplication array capacity, speed

Computerworld - EMC Corp. today announced a new version of its Data Domain data de-duplication appliance, the DD880, which now supports up more than 7 petabytes of backup storage across multiple devices through a global name space.

EMC also introduced new encryption software for the appliance, as well as new Data Domain Replicator software, which offers several disaster recovery and business continuity tools, including a "one-to-many" data replication topology.

EMC said it doubled the number of controllers to two and boosted the shelf space for disk drives on the DD880 so that it now has double the physical capacity of its predecessor, with up to 280TB of storage. The DD880 houses 1TB, 7,200-rpm serial ATA drives. Beyond that physical upgrade, the company also rolled out software that creates a single global name space allowing an almost unlimited number of DD880s to be managed under a single interface.

EMC also announced a new Global Deduplication Array (GDA), which is a multi-controller system that delivers up to 12.8 terabytes of throughput and uses global namespace to offer logical capacity of up to 14.2 petabytes in a single storage pool.

Ed Reidenbach, senior director of product management for EMC's Data Domain division, said administrators can use the additional capacity to consolidate up to 180 concurrent backup jobs or extend the retention period when used as a replication target for up to 180 remote offices. The capacity boost further minimizes the physical footprint, power and cooling required to protect large data sets in primary data centers and in disaster recovery sites.

"The expanded capacity of the Data Domain DD880 addresses enterprise customer needs for scalable storage systems for consolidation projects and extended retention policies," Robert Amatruda, an analyst at research firm IDC, said in a statement. "The addition of in-line encryption for de-duplicated data at rest offers all EMC Data Domain users an additional option for safeguarding their data."

Reidenbach said the company has also optimized data transfers for replication over WANs from remote sites or to disaster recovery sites. For those kinds of data transfers, Reidenbach said the company has increased bandwidth efficiencies by up to 100%. "By doing that, we get performance in data transfers of up to 12.8TB per hour," he said.

For the new GDA array, EMC also added a "fan-in" capability, which now allows up to 270 concurrent data write streams to the GDA. In other words, up to 270 remote Data Domain appliances can replicate data to the GDA.

From a security perspective, Data Domain Encryption software is a new option that provides the first encryption of data at rest on de-duplication storage. Data Domain performs in-line de-duplication through either 128-bit or 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithms for encrypting all data before it is written to disk.

Pricing for the DD880 and GDA varies according to capacity and capabilities, but a GDA with 23TB of usable capacity lists for just over $800,000. According to Reidenbach, the array offers compression ratios of 20:1 or 50:1, depending on configuration.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian, or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

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