This month saw new dedupe backup appliances from Greenbytes and Quantum that are VM-aware and reminded me that there is a lot going on in this particular market. Dedupe means avoiding making multiple backups of the same file, even if that file is found across different VMs or different users. Let’s look at some of the recent announcements and also point to places that we have covered dedupe techs in the recent past if you want to learn more about the subject.
John Cronin, a senior technical product manager for the storage and availability management group at Symantec, was one of our participants in our live text chat earlier this week. He mentioned that
“space optimized snapshots can use storage more efficiently. For example, in a virtual desktop environment most of the OS images have largely the same bits. If we store 1000 desktop images, we can save a lot of space if we only use one copy of the things that are the same and then store only the differences.”
Speaking of our chat series, in the first one that we held last month, we dived a bit deeper into dedupe, and you can replay the chat here.
So the major product announcements this month include the Greenbytes HA-3000 dedupe appliance and the Quantum DXi4601 dedupe appliance, which costs $21,500 for a 4 TB system, which is low for the kind of functionality it offers. It can also scale on demand from 4 TB up to 12 TB of usable capacity by simply activating the appropriate licensing key. Quantum claims it has twice the dedupe performance of competitors in its class at half the price. Last month, we even saw the beginnings of offering dedupe on actual silicon, which will speed up the process even further.
There are many backup technologies that are available that include dedupe as part of their feature set, and we review the major ones here and in a review of Acronis Backup here in stories we wrote over the summer.
