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Recoup with data dedupe

9 Photos Logan Harbaugh (Network World)

8 products that can help cut your storage costs through data duplication

  • HP StoreOnce Backup System While the HP system is not cheap, it offers true enterprise-class performance and scalability, with great ease of use. With the capability of backing up many servers simultaneously, it is capable of fitting into even the largest data center environments and providing data security for dozens of servers.

  • Compellent Storage Center (Dell) Compellent Storage Center was not really tested as part of this review, but it is instructive in another way that deduplication can be used in a SAN system. The two volumes used to test the seven other systems were stored on a Compellent SAN. The two volumes represented snapshots of a production volume taken automatically by the system about four months apart. Some 4,552 files, occupying 31.7GB of space, were changed or added to the volume. The two snapshots actually stored only changes to the data on the system — the total space used by both snapshots was not 589GB each, but only about 32GB, representing the changes made to the volume.

  • NetApp FAS 2040 System With a price as tested of $25,000 for 3.6TB of raw capacity, the 2040 provides an excellent feature set as a NAS system, great performance and the additional efficiency of deduplication without extra cost.

  • Barracuda Backup Service Model 690 At a price of US$9,999 plus the monthly fees for cloud storage, the Barracuda Backup Service is an excellent way to add complete disaster recovery to an organization with a low upfront cost and all the functionality one might wish for, including backup software.

  • ExaGrid Disk-based Backup System Ex10000E While the price as tested of $58,900 is relatively high, the performance, scalability and caliber of documentation and support reflect the enterprise orientation of the system. For a data center that needs to support multiple backups from several servers at once during a short backup window, the EX10000E should be on the short list for consideration.

  • The HP StoreOnce Backup System wins our Clear Choice test, but any of the products that we reviewed can help provide cost effective backup through data deduplication.

  • Xiotech File Storage Controller At a cost of $62,000 for 9.6TB, the Xiotech File Storage Controller and ISE Storage Blades offer a simple, easy-to-expand system that provides a good set of SAN storage features as well as the increased efficiency of file-level deduplication, at a lower cost per gigabyte than the NetApp with block-level.

  • FalconStor FDS SA101 The FalconStor FDS SA101 is an inexpensive appliance with a lot of expandability and a good feature set that includes WAN replication to other appliances. There is also an option for a virtual appliance running as a VM on VMware, or a gateway appliance that uses existing storage to create a deduplicated share for backups.

  • Quantum DXi4520 Disk Deduplication Backup Appliance At $22,500 as tested, the DXi4520 is more expensive than the Barracuda or FalconStor offerings, but includes replication capability, four Ethernet ports, full NAS functionality and excellent reporting.

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