EMC Talks Disk & De-Dupe

ORLANDO, Fla. -- EMC World -- EMC unveiled announcements around de-duplication, backup, and VTL technology at its annual end-user event here today. (See Tucci Taps Virtuous Information, EMC Unveils Next-Gen Backup, and EMC Intros DL6000.)

Speaking during a keynote, EMC CEO Joe Tucci highlighted the changing storage landscape, which has many customers drowning in data. "When I started in this industry in the seventies, everything was measured in Mbytes -- a really big system had about 500 Mbytes," he said. "Now, we're measuring in Pbytes."

Tucci maintains that over the next three years virtually all data will be recovered from disk, as opposed to tape. This puts technologies like data de-duplication, which compresses data that appears in more than one place, in the spotlight. (See Analysis: Data De-Duping.)

High-End Disk Library

Given Tucci's comments, it's no surprise that EMC unveiled a high-capacity disk library.The 1.8-Pbyte DL6000 is already being touted by EMC as the industry's largest and fastest open-systems VTL. "This is for companies that want to replace 5 or 6 VTLs," said Barbara Robidoux, EMC's vice president of storage product marketing, during a press conference this morning.

The DL6000 has a pricetag to match its capacity: A system list price starts at $1 million. "The use case for this is very high-end customers that have been buying large VTLs," she added.

One early adopter of the DL6000 is Rottendorf, Germany-based supermarket chain Edeka, which is currently testing the system. "The big benefit is performance," said Andreas Schmich, the firm's systems administrator. "For Windows backups, it's faster than Sun Media Server."

The administrator told Byte and Switch that Edeka currently stores 50 Tbytes on the DL6000, although, with the firm still at the testing stage, he was unable to confirm exactly how much faster his Windows backups are compared to Sun.

The DL6000, which will be available in June, is based on the same architecture as EMC's Symmetrix DMX-3 system, and comes at a time when vendors are cranking up their open VTL strategies. (See Bank Uses EMC and EMC Approves QLogic 10G.) Rival Sun, for example, is yet to ship its 1-Pbyte VTL Enterprise offering. (See Sun Opens Tape Again, Sun, FalconStor Develop VTL, StorageTek Users Voice Support Fears, and Sun Shuts Door on VSM Open.)De-Duplication Upgrade

EMC also had news around de-duplication technology gleaned from its acquisition of Avamar for $165 million last November. (See EMC Picks Up Avamar.) EMC has expanded its de-dupe support to include Celerra NAS systems and VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB). (See EMC Picks Up Avamar and Dealing With De-Dupe Doubts .)

"With Avamar, you can reduce VMware backup times by up to 90 percent," said David Donatelli, EMC's vice president of storage product operations, during the press conference that kicked off the day's events.

Other vendors have been fleshing out their product portfolios in this space, including Data Domain and NetApp, which recently added de-dupe features to its FAS and NearStore R200 product lines. (See NetApp De-Dupes, Data Domain Unveils DD580, and NetApp's Kidd Talks Turkey.)

Despite EMC's news, there was still no mention of when the vendor plans to offer target-based de-duplication, which is already offered by rivals Data Domain, Diligent, and Quantum. (See Data Domain Adds VTL Option, Quantum Leaps Into De-Duplication, and Air Force Chooses Diligent.)Avamar version 3.7 will be available next month, priced at around $26,500.

Server Recovery

EMC also focused its attention outside of storage hardware today, unveiling a software product called HomeBase, which automates bare-metal server recovery in the event of a hardware failure or disaster, according to the vendor.

HomeBase integrates with VMware and the vendor's Networker backup and recovery software and is available now, priced at $15,000 for the first server covered and $1,000 for each additional server.

CDPA new version of the RecoverPoint CDP software debuted today, which includes support for Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). The idea behind VSS is that it can improve the automation and management of backup for the likes of Microsoft Exchange Server and SQL Server.

James Rogers, Senior Editor Byte and Switch