HP prepares double dose of data deduplication |
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By Dave Raffo, News Director
18 Jun 2008 | SearchStorage.co.uk |
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Hewlett-Packard will enter the data deduplication market with two types of dedupe products at the end of the month.
HP hasn't announced anything yet, but it is showing off the products at the HP Technology Forum show in Las Vegas this week. The data deduplication products include two new members of the D2D Backup System disk appliance platform that HP launched last year and a data deduplication license option for its existing VLS virtual tape libraries (VTL). The D2D devices use HP's internally developed data deduplication technology, but for the enterprise tape libraries, HP will OEM data deduplication technology from Sepaton.
HP had planned to launch the data dedupe products at its Technology Forum but decided to push the launch back two weeks. Stephan Schmitt, vice president of marketing for HP StorageWorks, said the products will be formally launched next week and will begin shipping June 30.
"HP is approaching the deduplication opportunity with a two-tiered approach using two separate technologies," wrote financial analyst Tom Curlin of RBC Capital Markets earlier this week in a note to clients. "For the SMB/remote office customer we believe HP has inline deduplication technology that will be incorporated into its D2D Backup System. For the enterprise data centre, HP sources Sepaton as its go-to-market partner, embedding its DeltaStor post-process deduplication software into its HP virtual library systems."
Schmitt didn't say anything else about the products but other HP sources and documents used for a webinar with company employees provided greater details. HP calls its deduplication flavors Dynamic Deduplication and Accelerated Deduplication. HP Labs developed the former, an in-line hash-based chunking version that will run on the D2D appliances. Accelerated Deduplication is HP's name for Sepaton's DeltaStor application.
Appliance-based deduplication
The D2D2500 and D2D4000 are larger versions of HP's D2D100 appliance, which came out in February 2007. The 2500, a 1U rack-mount backup system aimed at SMBs or remote offices of larger organizations, has an iSCSI interface and scales to six servers and 2.25 TB of usable capacity. The 4000, a 2U backup system aimed at companies with 500 to 1,000 employees, connects via iSCSI and Fibre Channel, and scales to16 servers and 7.5 TB. The 2500 supports RAID 5; the 4000 supports RAID 6. Data deduplication will not be offered on the D2D100 appliances.
HP claims a data deduplication ratio of 50:1 is possible with its Dynamic Deduplication application for daily full backups over three months and a 20:1 deduplication for daily incrementals and weekly fulls over that span. As with the Accelerated Deduplication product, HP plans to support replication later this year, but it will not be available at launch.
HP considers the 2500 competitive with entry-level NAS systems, such as Dell's PowerEdge DP500, Overland's REO1500 and Adaptec's Snap Server 410, all systems that do not include data deduplication. It will position the 4000 as a lower-priced alternative to deduplication backup products from Data Domain, EMC, Quantum and ExaGrid. List price for the 2500 is $6,499 (£3,250); the 4000 ranges from $18,999 (£9,500) with 4 TB of raw capacity and ISCI to $42,998 (£21,500) with 9 TB raw and Fibre Channel.
Accelerated Deduplication will be available for a license fee per terabyte on HP's existing VLS6000 and VLS9000 enterprise VTLs and the VLS12000 EVA gateway. The VLS6000 series is for midrange enterprises, and the VLS9000 and the VLS12000 EVA gateway are for enterprise SANs. The enterprise VTLs scan to eight nodes and 16 arrays.
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