De-Dupe Deep Dive

Vendors are cranking up their efforts around the emerging de-duplication market, with Data Domain expanding its product range today and EMC weighing up its de-dupe options. (See Data Domain Unveils DD580 and EMC Picks Up Avamar.)

De-dupe is gaining momentum amongst users looking to reduce the amount of data they back up. (See Users Look Ahead to 2007.) The idea behind the technology is that it compresses data that appears in more than one place, with vendors promising all sorts of new performance and capacity gains. (See De-Dupe Vendors Shake Hands, Quantum Delves Deeper Into De-Dupe, and Analysis: Data De-Duping.)

Data Domain, which recently joined the growing list of storage vendors moving towards IPO, today unveiled its disk-based DD580 device. (See Data Domain Files S1 and Storage Bubble Wrap.) With a throughput of 800 Gbytes per hour, the DD580 offers double the speed of its predecessor, the DD560, according to Brian Biles, Data Domain's vice president of product marketing. "Our previous version had two single-core [Intel Xeon] chips," he says, explaining that the DD580 uses dual-core Intel Woodcrest processors.

The vendor has also expanded the storage capacity of the DD580 compared to its predecessor, from 23.5 TBytes to 31.5 Tbytes. But the capacity hike comes at a premium; pricing for the DD580, which is available now, starts at $120,000 compared to $95,000 for the DD560.

Despite the price differential, at least one user is planning an upgrade. "It's fast [and] easy-to-use -- there is very little that I have to do with it," says Eric Eckman, IT manager at Santa Clara, Calif.-based manufacturing firm Atheros Communications, which already has four DD560s and is currently beta testing the DD580.