EMC's New DD Boost Software

[Joe_Pfeiffer]

Today at EMC World in Boston EMC announced a new piece of software to complement their DataDomain hardware appliance systems called "DD Boost".  Press release here.  Built on top of Symantec OpenStorage, the DD Boost package moves the dedupe process to the NetBackup Media Server from the DataDomain controller thus reducing the needed bandwidth between a Media Server and a DataDomain device.  Nice.  It allows them to also dramatically ramp their performance numbers and double the advertised throughput.  It will be interesting to see what the other OpenStorage vendors will do to catch up.

It's great to see OpenStorage vendors like EMC DataDomain building even more functionality on top of the API.  The first purpose of OpenStorage was to remove the limitation of talking to these disk devices as tape (VTL).  Now that almost every major disk vendor is part of OpenStorage we've been able to build even more features in to the API.  It's even better to see the disk vendors themselves taking on the task of building unique features.  Best of breed backup software with the disk vendor of your choice - and DataDomain can be a great choice based on this DD Boost it sounds like.

OpenStorage has also been a big benefit to us internally within NetBackup since it formed a framework that we used to build deduplication into all of the components of NetBackup 7.  Very similar to what DD Boost offers - NetBackup 7 can dedupe at the Media Server and if network bandwidth is a real concern the whole dedupe process can be moved all the way up to the client that is being backed up itself.  We're really strong advocates of the "dedupe everywhere" idea - weather it be client, backup (what we call a media) server, or a disk appliance.  The EMC DD Boost announcement today further validates that belief by being able to dedupe in more places.  Great to have lots of options.