Sepaton releases remote office backup

Computerworld - Sepaton today announced a line of remote office backup appliances that can compress and replicate data over long distances to a primary data center. The devices can also be used for temporary or long-term local storage.

The three models in the new Sepaton DS3 family use two Fibre Channel ports and two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports to cut backup and restore times. The DS3 Series appliances offer backup speeds from 600MB/sec. to 1500MB/sec.

The DS3 appliances work in concert with Sepaton's enterprise-class S2100-ES2 data center backup array, which can store between 12TB and 1.6 petabytes of data. The DS3 appliances can be used to back up servers in remote offices, and to compress and deduplicate data before replicating it back to an ES2 backup array housed in a main data center.

"Typically what we're seeing are customers that want to keep a backup copy at a remote site for two to four weeks on the DS3 because most recoveries happen during that time frame. Then they set the DS3 to replicate to their data center, where they keep the data on the ES2 for three to six months before sending it off to tape," said Linda Mentzer, vice president of product management for Sepaton.

Foxwoods Casino in Mashantucket, Conn., is using a DS3 appliance in a different configuration than the one Sepaton has suggested. Michael Grillo, principal engineer for MIS enterprise systems at Foxwoods, said the casino is using the appliance and a 40TB expansion unit as a primary backup storage device in its offsite disaster recovery center.

Foxwoods, which installed the appliance about three weeks ago, uses IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager to send backup data from the main data center to the disaster recovery site, he said.

Since installing the Sepaton unit, Grillo said his six-hour disaster recovery backup windows, which involved sending 7TB of data offsite, have all but vanished. He said Foxwood's backup data is now compressed at a 3:1 to 4:1 ratio.

"You're optimizing because you're sending only your deltas to the DR site. And even that's deduplicated," he said.

Now that he uses the DS3, Grillo said he no longer needs the casino's IBM 3585 tape library. He now stores all of his compressed DR data on the DS3, which speeds recovery times.

Besides IBM's Tivoli software, DS3 appliances work with backup applications such as EMC's NetWorker and Hewlett-Packard's Data Protector.

It also supports Symantec NetBackup, including NetBackup OpenStorage Technology (OST) on 10Gigabit Ethernet concurrently with Fibre Channel tape emulation. OST is an API that allows NetBackup servers to replicate to cloud storage services.

The appliances support Symantec's NetBackup AIR, or auto image replication, which automatically copies the backup catalog that exists in a DR site, Mentzer said.

The new 2U (3.5-in high) arrays, offer automated load-balancing of backup, restore, deduplication and replication.

The DS3 comes in these three configurations:

• The DS3 series 1000, which holds up to 10TB of data, has an ingest rate of 600MB/sec. and comes with two 4Gbps Fibre Channel ports.
• The DS3 Series 2000, which holds up to 20TB of data and has an ingest rate of 1,200MB/sec. and comes with four 4Gbps Fibre Channel ports.
• The DS3 Series 2000e, which holds up to 20TB of data, has two 4Gbps Fibre Channel ports, two 10Gbps Ethernet ports and has an ingest rate of 1,500MB/sec.

Sepaton also sells a separate 2U 12-disk expansion unit that holds up to 40TB of data. Each DS3 series appliance can support up to three attached expansion units.

Pricing starts at $110,000 for a DS3 series 1000 appliance with 10TB of usable capacity.

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 email address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

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