What VTL?

[Steve_Brach]

Searched the Forum and nobody has asked this question since 2005.  Planning on buying a VTL.  Looking for advice.  Start very basic.  50 TB's.  Inital project does not contain vaulting..just short term retention data living on the disk.  Might not even need de-dup.  Any input would help.  

[Alex_Vasquez]

Well, I can advise you on one solution.  It's from Data Domain.  They offer a variety of units that are all stable, robust and reliable.  We're using a  unit that's a year or two old.  It has a capacity of about 1.8TB of RAW space.  But with its de-dupe we've managed about 25TB of data on it.  We're looking into the DDR580, which was recently released.  The thing we like about it is how straightforward it is.  Also, you can replicate to another DDR unit.  Here's a link:
http://www.datadomain.com/products/arrays.html
Going with the afforementioned solution would allow us to go tapeless, essentially.  I, personally, would like that.

[Steve_Brach]

Data Domain is one of the vendors we are going to evaluate.  The amount of capacity we desire is my only concern with them.  How are they with support?

[Omar_Villa]

Hi, just must add to your list the EMC CDL, it defenitly can handle the amount of data your are talking about, EMC support is good, but is to new for me to recomend it, but at the moment looks is running, with regular migration issues, but nothing big.

Regards.

[Alex_Vasquez]

Actually, thus far, my experience has been positive with regard to their support.  I've called and my wait times are minimal and I always get a tech, so I don't have to wait for a call back.  This does change, I think during peak hours.

I don't know what your capacity needs are, but when you consider that, for one terabyte of data, you can easily hold up to 25TB of compressed data; which means a unit with 5TB of RAW capacity could actually hold over 100TB of data.  With the newer units, they are modular so you can add more to it.  Also, look at their gateway solution.  Essentially you could take a storage unit from NetApp, EMC, or Hitachi and throw a Data Domain front end on top of it and still get the same de dupe ratios with more robust disk from the afforementioned units.

[Rakesh_Khandelw]

It's too broad of a subjec to be discussed here..  There are lots of factors you should look into and below are some  -

How much money you have?

What problem are you trying to address?

Size of your Full/incremental Backups

Data Retention.

Data type

Some VTL provides compression only and some provide de-duplication. One with De-duplication may be little expensive than one providing compression. Some has built-in  compression/de-duplication engine to stroage like Data Domain and some have additional appliance  like Diligent and you can use any storage underneath it. Some provides you capability of exporting data to tapes without going through media server without an update to NBU catalog, whereas some vendor like NetApp has special hooks to NBU catalog and it let you create the tape and update catalog too. With NBU 6.5 this has been enhanced further.

NetBackup Pure Disk provides you something similar to a VTL solution and currently is available for remote offices (over the WAN backups). With 6.5 release it will be available for Enterprise also.

In Nutshell, recommendation from person A may be not good for your environment if your environment/requirement are very different. You will have to do bit of homework to list your requirements and then see who fulfills your requirement without adding overhead to your day to day work and with least management work.

[Todd_Moriarty]

Just started using the STK VTL series here, and very happy, throughput is outstanding (120MB/sec+ for local backups on media servers) only bottlenecks i have are the media server front-end (can't feed data fast enough on etherchanneled gigE adapters) and demux in Vault

[Chad_Wansing_2]

We're currently evaluating solutions from NetApp and Quantum.  We're using both companies already in our environment (for filers and libraries) and wanted to keep all the different support lines to a minimum.  They both look very robust for the short time we've been checking them out (only about a week now).  One of my big things is that I like the idea of de-duping on a block-level vs. file level for our particular environment, one thing that (as I understand it) Data Domain doesn't do.

[teejayman]

Hi,

We just ordered two appliances from data domain, the DD560 (~5TB physical disk), and I am glad to hear that they work as well as they say it will. Are you archiving to tape as well as we plan on doing? If so, what kind of throuput are you getting? I am also interesed to know how you set up your NB policy to use both the DD appliance and tape? Are you using disk staging?

Thanks
Tijan