Data Domain Launches DD880; Improves Management

Data Domain is touting its DD880 backup array as the fastest back-up array in delivered in both all in one appliance with storage and a gateway model that can front-end other storage devices. The DD880 starts at $400,000 with approximately 22 terabytes of storage. Data Domain has also updated Enterprise Manager adding additional monitoring and configuration options to the GUI.  This can only be good news for EMC which is set to acquire Data Domain.

Data Domain claims 5.4 TB/hr back-up speed with the capacity of 71TB capacity with the potential for 3.5 PB after deduplication. The DD880 is powered by a 4way Intel processor and has redundant 10gb and 1gb Ethernet ports, redundant dual port 4gb Fiber Channel for VTL, redundant, hot swappable power supplies.

Michael Passe, Storage Architect for Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston is a Data Domain customer and participated in the DD880 beta test. During the test working with non-production data, Passe put the product through its paces and is happy with the results. The medical center is backing up 80 to 100 TB per week with the bulk of the data writes occurring on the week-end doing full back-ups. Since the Data Domain products don't support clustering, resulting in single points of failure, Passe paired it with  CommVault's CommGrid for fault tolerance. Passe already use DD580's for deduplication and will most likely augment or replace them with the DD880 during a storage upgrade in the coming months.

Data Domain also enhanced their Enterprise Manager to make the management and monitoring more accessible for those administrators more used to GUIs than CLIs. Administrators can monitor their entire Data Domain infrastructure through the management application such as monitor and configure appliance nodes, support bundles, replication and recover status. The company has plans to add configuration controls for alerts, disks, and chassis in the future.

The big question is what will EMC do with Data Domain after the acquisition. Organizations like Beth Israel, which is already an EMC shop, are concerned about the product plans going forward. For example, Passe prefers using Data Domains capture storage because it is segregated from their SAN and a problem on one product line won't affect another. But if, for example, EMC wants to integrate it's Clarion storage, Passe would have to buy a separate frame for archiving which might drive costs up, Passe speculates.