'Mr Backup' tracks race for dedupe speed trial domination

Many-headed HYDRAstor wins

NEC's HYDRAstor crushes its competitors into the dust in the inline deduplication speed races, being more than three times faster than Symantec, which is in turn twice as fast as Data Domain.

The numbers come from W Curtis Preston, aka "Mr Backup". He has used published figures from the vendors, and is careful to quote clustered deduplication numbers only where the cluster nodes deduplicate globally, separating out grouped systems such as EMC's DDX cluster of Data Domain nodes, which do not have a global deduplication capability.

The EMC GDA is a two-node Data Domain cluster that does do global deduplication and uses "NetBackup's OST and Data Domain's Boost to load balance data across two DD880s".

NEC's HYDRAstor HS8-2000 has 55 accelerator nodes in a cluster and is rated at 27,500MB/sec for inline deduplication. Next up is the NetBackup 5000 from Symantec, which achieves 7,166MB/sec, but then it only has six nodes, more than nines times fewer than the NEC box set, with each node contributing 1,194MB/sec. That's far more than an individual NEC node.

Third place is taken by EMC's GDA with 3,555MB/sec, followed by a single Data Domain 880 using Boost to reach 2,444MB/sec, and 1,500MB/sec without Boost.

The trailers are IBM's ProtecTier with 1,000MB/sec from a two-node cluster, GreenBytes with 950MB/sec from its GB 4000 and then HP' H2D4312 with 666MB/sec.

Post-process dedupe

Running deduplication after data has landed on the target device means that the dedupe products have an ingest speed and then a deduplication speed. FalconStor's VTL is fastest at ingest with 12,000MB/sec across its eight nodes, followed by Exagrid's 10-node EX10000E with 5,000MB/sec using NetBackup and OST. Removing NetBackup drops the EX10000E down to 3,500MB/sec. Sepaton's eight-node S2100-ES2 fits between these two Exagrid numbers with 4,440MB/sec, and Preston has Quantum's single-node DXi 8500 fifth with a 1,777MB/sec ingest speed.

Once ingested, the fastest deduper of this bunch is the Sepaton with 2,314MB/sec, followed by FalconStor and the two Exagrid clusters all with 2,000MB/sec. Fifth again is the DXi 8500.

These are all sheer speed figures and no account is taken of cost or dedupe efficiency. We might ask how fast a clustered Quantum DXi product would be? It's surely on Quantum's roadmap to produce a clustered DXi with global deduplication. We might also ask how fast a deduplicating array using Permabit's Albireo technology would be, that company saying its deduplication has no effect on array performance at all.

Have a look at Preston's table for the daily backup capacity of each product. He says three vendors told him they will have major product refreshes by the end of the year, implying faster dedupe speed and/or global deduplication. We might guess that both EMC Data Domain and Quantum will introduce global deduplication with greater than two-node clusters but it's just guessing. The third vendor could be HP, which is saying good things about its in-house technology, but it could just as well be IBM or Sepaton or one of the others. ®