Sepaton Doubles Backup Performance

It's a double blow for storage professionals: Data is growing exponentially, while backup windows are shrinking. Sepaton, a company that already claims to provide the fastest backup, is now shipping the S2100-ES2 Series 1910/2910 system with version 6.0 software. It delivers "the industry's fastest performance, multiprotocol support, high reliability and industry-leading deduplication," say company officials. At up to 1,500Mbytes/second/node, the 2100 provides more than double the performance of previous models. It has 64-bit hardware and software in a 2U form factor, with 48Gbytes of RAM and 72 percent less of a power/cooling footprint. In addition, it adds support for Symantec NetBackup OpenStorage on 10 Gbit Ethernet concurrently with Fibre Channel tape emulation, which should ease platform migration issues for enterprise customers.

Starting at $257,500, the system is built around Hitachi Data Systems AMS 2100 disk arrays and features reliability enhancements, including automatic snapshots of the DeltaStor database, a streamlined software installation process, automatic verification of software versions on all nodes, intelligent handling of full storage pools and redundant links among nodes. Sepaton has also enhanced its deduplication ratios for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) capabilities.

Backup has been boosted to 43.2Tbytes per hour, and users can incrementally add more capabilities as their needs grow, says the company.

While he finds the hardware refresh interesting, particularly the ability to simultaneously work in both Fibre Channel and 10Gbit Ethernet, (which gives data center managers the opportunity to make a single data protection choice for both environments), what really excites Mike Karp, VP and principal analyst, Ptak/Noel Associates, is the new software release. "Integration with mission-critical software is of paramount importance in this segment, and shops using TSM will certainly want to take advantage of Sepaton's increased integration with the TSM software. Additionally, as TSM sites are often quite large, Sepaton's linear scale-out capability makes this a very competitive offering."

Dave Russell, Gartner Research VP, storage technologies and strategies, also likes the new software capabilities, but he thinks there's another benefit to the hardware. "The ability to scale and to store a large amount of data should allow large enterprises to consolidate on a smaller number of deployments to avoid "appliance sprawl." Sepaton says single/dual-controller point solutions like EMC's Data Domain require five times as many systems to handle growth.According to a recent report from Gartner ("User Survey Analysis: Key Trends Shaping the Future of Data Center Infrastructure Through 2011"), data growth is the biggest data center hardware infrastructure challenge for large enterprises. Almost half of the respondents (47 percent) ranked data growth in their top three challenges, and 62 percent will be investing in data archiving or retirement by the end of 2011 to address the data growth challenge. The other top-ranked data-growth initiatives include storage consolidation, storage management tools and data reduction techniques.

Doing backups faster is really important, says Deni Connor, principal, Storage Strategies NOW. "Most vendors of deduplication appliances are posting ingest enhancements which signal a need for faster arrays that can keep up with increasing amounts of data. As the amount of data that needs to be backed up and deduplicated increases, the new Sepaton arrays keep up. They have double the backup ingest rate of previous Sepaton arrays--up to 1500Mbytes/second/node--and because they use new Xeon processors, they have improved power and cooling."

With its focus on delivering data protection platforms with enterprise-class capabilities--such as massive grid scalability, storage pooling that enables phased migration to new technologies and cloud enabling multitenancy--the new Sepaton offering will be a key platform for enterprises to control the rising costs of managing massive data volumes and exponential data growth, notes Laura Dubois, program VP, IDC.

From a competitive perspective, Sepaton's multinode scale-out architecture allows for massive scalability to meet performance (and capacity) requirements, says Lauren Whitehouse, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, especially when compared with EMC's recent announcements.

"EMC has made a big point about their very impressive single-node performance numbers, especially highlighting the performance improvements with their Symantec OST-enabled Boost component. Competing solutions, such as Sepaton, that have multinode or grid architectures, promote the performance scale of their solutions, with and without an OST 'boost.' The difference is that EMC's solution will hit a limit before another unit would have to be added to the environment, or it will have to get swapped out for a larger model. With Sepaton, additional nodes can be seamlessly added to the configuration to grow with an organization's capacity and performance needs." This could translate into cost savings (lower administrative overhead, higher capacity utilization), time savings (greater agility to support change, less management than having multiple backup devices) and risk reduction (no interruption in backup processes), she adds.Karp questions how long Sepaton can remain the major independent provider of dedupe appliances. "Right now, the company seems well-positioned going forward. Their relationship with HDS is critical and seems to be working out well so far for both companies, ... [and] the relationships with Symantec and Hewlett-Packard will also be useful. These alliances give Sepaton far more feet on the street than they could possibly provide by themselves, and increase the likelihood of Sepaton continuing to be a significant player in this segment area."

Russell agrees with Karp that the future independence of Sepaton looks good, as the ongoing consolidation of backup vendors enables the company to stand out from a smaller number of competitors. "What would really favor Sepaton, though, is consolidation in the minds and practices of end users, whereby enterprises seek to deploy a smaller number of larger solutions and to use these as a platform for multiple uses cases--backup, archiving, disaster recovery, etc."

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