DDUP doubles speed: EMC pleasantly surprised

Data Domain announced their DD880 today that doubles the speed and capacity of the DD690.  Nice move.  It looks like it was news to us AND EMC!

The DD880 doubles the potential throughput from 750 MB/s to 1500 MB/s  — if you use dual-10GbE and NetBackup’s OST. The rest of you that don’t use OST will have to settle for around 900 MB/s or so.  I agree with @SepatonJay and don’t like that they advertise only the OST number, and you have to pull the non-OST number out of them.  (They’ll give it if you ask, but I think it should at least be in the footnote.)

The DD880 also doubles the capacity that you could attach to a DD690, from 35 TB to 71 TB.  This is also important, as the current capacity often forced customers to split their backups between multiple DD690s.  This will help that.

No, they still don’t have multi-node, global dedupe, and yes I still think this is a problem.  1500 MB/s may sound like a lot (it is!), but it’s still not enough in very large environments.  In addition, I’ve got enterprise customers with single databases bigger than their 71 TB max capacity.  It’s still needed, and I hope they continue developing it.

One interesting note is that apparently many people at EMC didn’t know this was coming when they agreed to pay $2.1B for DDUP.  It’s hard to believe that no one knew, given that Frank Slootman said publicly that they were going to announce a product that was “like two DD690s,” which is essentially what this product is.  But sources inside DDUP tell me that the people they are talking to at EMC were indeed surprised by the announcement — pleasantly so, of course.  So I think it’s possible that the people who were in charge of the bidding process were indeed bidding based solely on revenue and projections, rather than on inside knowledge about upcoming products.

Another interesting note is that DDUP’s box is now using the hardware that IBM’s ProtecTier product was running on for a while and is getting more out of it.  (IBM has since moved on to a six-core system.)  DDUP is getting 900-1500 MB/s out of a single node, where IBM is getting that numbers only with two nodes — and DDUP is using cheaper hardware!  In addition, their single stream throughput has now increased to just over 300 MB/s — more than three times IBM’s single stream throughput numbers.  (Single stream performance really matters in restores and copies to tape.  IBM’s single stream throughput is 90 MB/s — not enough to stream an LTO-4.)

At a beginning list price of $400K for a node with a single shelf, this is also double the price of the DD690.  Using shelf pricing from the 690, it should then cost about $280K to fill it to its max capacity, and $35K+ for a replication license.  That’s a little over $700K for a 71 TB system that can hold 700-1400 TB. (Your mileage may vary.)

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O'Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at Sullivan Strickler, which helps companies manage their legacy data