With the advent of inexpensive disk-to-disk backup systems that offer faster, easier and more reliable backups and restores than most tape systems, many administrators would like to abandon tape altogether. However, a standard schedule of one full backup per week plus nightly incremental backups uses up a lot of storage space, the kind of space that only tape traditionally offers at a reasonable per-gigabyte cost.
Data Domain aims to solve this with the DD460 Restorer. The appliance appears on the network as a standard NAS device. When a backup application writes data to the DD460, it scans for patterns between the incoming data and data already saved to disk. When it finds duplicates, the DD460 inserts a pointer to the original block rather than saving the data yet again.
I found that this approach yielded a compression ratio of as much as 455-to-1 when performing a backup of data that had changed only slightly since the original backup, which means this 4TB appliance realistically stores 85TB worth of backup data. This high level of compression means that administrators could perform full backups every night without requiring much in the way of additional storage space.
The DD460 provides two levels of data compression. The initial compression, called global compression, generally provides about 2-to-1 ratio compression. The other level is local compression. This approach uses proprietary Data Domain technology to find identical strings of data and yields far higher compression, even on an initial backup. The amount of compression achieved will depend on the type of data you’re backing up.
In my tests at the Data Domain labs, we backed up several types of data, both from a Linux system, using tar, and from a Windows system, using Veritas Backup Exec. The data included a 9.4GB set of Oracle database files, a mix of standard files that would be typical of a file server, and a large file that was all zeros.
The 9.4GB of Oracle files became 4.6GB after global compression, and then 216MB on disk after local compression. When I backed up the same 9.4GB of files a second time, they used up an additional 20MB of disk space. All this compression occurred in real time while files were being backed up at 70MBps.
The set of mixed files was initially 3.2GB, which became 2.5GB after global compression and 1.3GB after local compression. After some of the files in this group were changed, a second backup used an additional 11MB of disk space.
The Data Domain DD460 is reliable, easy to use, and speedier than disk-to-disk systems, making the appliance worthy of consideration by any organization interested in backup and restore alternatives.
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