“With Data Domain, we now have assurance that our mission-critical data, the lifeblood of our business, is not only backed up quickly and easily, but I’m fully confident that the data is restorable.” — Graham Breeze
Information Technology Director
OuterBay

Press Release

Data Domain Delivers Breakthrough Protection and Simplicity in a Cost-Effective, Disk-Based Recovery Appliance

Renowned Storage Architects Unveil First Storage Recovery Software and Hardware Solution that Supports Standard Backup Software with Proactive Verification, Fast Recoverability, and 20x Global Compression

SAN MATEO, Calif. — June 9, 2003 — Data Domain today announced a storage industry breakthrough in protection, simplicity, and reliability with its new disk-based recovery storage solution, the DD200™ Recovery Appliance and the Data Domain Restore Protection ManagerTM (DD RPM™) software. Designed from the ground up to support existing backup software, the DD200 is the industry’s first disk-based recovery appliance to combine full recoverability verification with speed and cost-optimization for recovery data. Combined with the DD RPM software, this Data Domain solution makes restore and backup functions faster, simpler, and dramatically more reliable than existing solutions, at a cost competitive with tape automation.

Designed by renowned experts from Network Appliance and Princeton University, the DD200 Recovery Appliance’s integrated hardware and software components represent breakthrough technology advancements. DD RPM includes the first production file system software to offer proactive, end-to-end data consistency and integrity verification — providing the highest level of protection for data recovery in the industry. With its innovative Global Compression™ technology, the DD RPM software requires an order of magnitude fewer disks to store backup data than conventional ATA RAID backup solutions. By supporting standard backup packages from industry leaders, DD RPM also eliminates disruption in the data center. Designed for resilience, the Data Domain solution enables months of data backups to be kept cost-effectively on disks instead of in remote tape libraries, allowing faster, onsite, online recoveries.

“Backup-and-restore represents the largest single expense in the total cost of ownership of storage,” said Nick Allen, Vice President and Research Director, Gartner, Inc. “However, backup-and-restore is also the least reliable link in the storage ecosystem. In the future, most restores will be from disk, not tape.”

“There are two key components to Documentum’s backup strategy. One is recovering from major disasters, which is why we take tapes off-site. But the other is recovering from the small, daily disaster of accidental file deletion or corruption. In the latter case, it is critical that we recover files quickly and easily without going to off-site storage or searching through tape archives,” said Jeff Ward, director of IT services at Documentum. “We are pleased with Data Domain’s strategy in the area of rapid recovery, and we are actively testing this solution in our primary Data Center. Data Domain’s appliance is easy to deploy and use, so our pilot project has not required a significant investment of time and resources.”

Proactive, Continuous Verification of Data Recoverability

DD RPM was designed from the ground up to focus on protecting recovery copies. With primary storage, the design center focuses on block I/O response time; in contrast, DD RPM includes the first production file system to have an architecture designed and optimized for data protection. If a normal file system is used for recovery storage and a consistency problem occurs, that problem isn’t apparent until someone attempts to restore a file — the worst time to discover that data is unreachable. After storing a recovery copy, DD RPM verifies end-to-end that the data on disk is reachable and correct at the time of the backup. DD RPM then repeats consistency checking and data self-healing continuously in the background. With its custom append-only file system, DD RPM also protects against erroneous block overwrites and many of the other software faults that can cause silent data loss in conventional storage systems.

Global Compression and Redundancy Pooling: Lower Costs, Less to Manage

DD RPM’s patent-pending Global Compression™ technology reduces the size of recovery copies by an average of 20 times versus traditional backup storage over a typical four-month time frame, lowering the costs of purchasing and managing storage significantly. Even with highly protective mirroring RAID and spares, a DD200 appliance with just 16 disks can hold up to 23 TB of recovery data.

With RPM Global Compression, the backup data stream is broken into variable-length segments that are smaller than the average block; RPM stores to disk only the segments that have not been stored before, pooling redundancies. This content-based scheme identifies changes below and across blocks, independent of backup software formats or client data type. The Global Compression technology applies equally well to file systems, databases, and email. RPM is optimized for enterprise backup data — data that changes incrementally day to day. Operating an order of magnitude faster than standard software compression, the DD200 with DD RPM’s Global Compression averages more than 150 GB per hour throughput.

“Data Domain is offering a product that fits conservatively in the enterprise, where backup has to evolve,” said Steve Kenniston, senior analyst, Enterprise Storage Group. “The company has designed a storage appliance for standard backup software that offers a new level of data protection while being both simple to install and deploy. If it wasn’t clear that tape automation would be challenged by disk-based solutions, it is crystal clear starting now. Data Domain’s solution has the capability to deliver a solid ROI from disk and tape savings as well as enterprise reliability and faster recovery times.”

“The biggest factors contributing to rising storage costs are tape technology and its administration,” said Kai Li, CTO of Data Domain. “With DD RPM and the disk-based DD200 appliance, Data Domain is on a mission to make recovery operations much more reliable, simpler, and cost-effective for users of standard backup software.”

Improves Operation of Standard Backup Software

The DD200 appliance supports standard backup software from all the market leaders. Using the DD200 improves the performance and reliability of these widely installed products. For example, employing their user-driven restore clients, end users can safely recover files on their own, without requiring administrator intervention — something that is rarely if ever possible with tape automation. The DD200 is also optimized to support simultaneous backups-and-restores and simultaneous slow backup client streams. It connects to Unix or Linux-based backup media servers using NFS V3; CIFS support for NT-based media servers will be available in 2004.

DD200 and DD RPM Availability, Pricing and Capacity

Data Domain’s DD200 Recovery Appliance and the DD RPM software will be generally available in the second half of 2003. List price for the 4U rackmount unit is $58,000 per unit for 23 TB of recovery copy storage, or about $2.50 per GB of protected capacity. This price includes the DD200 system with sixteen 250-GB ATA disks at $25,300, and the DD RPM software license to run on the DD200 including the NFS V3 protocol at $32,700. A single DD200 is configured to back up from 0.5 TB to 1.5 TB of primary storage for months of retention; more units may be applied to the backup server for additional bandwidth or capacity.

  • Kai Li — Founder and Chief Scientist — Kai Li, professor at the Computer Science Department of Princeton University, has led research projects involving operating systems, computer architecture, distributed systems and scalable display systems. His work with Shared Virtual Memory contributed significantly to future storage applications such as the Direct Access File System (DAFS) standard. He has been a consultant of AT&T, Bell Labs, Digital Equipment Corporation, NEC Research Institute, and a board member of the Intel Microcomputer Research Lab Advisory council since 2000.
  • Hugo Patterson — Chief Architect — Hugo Patterson brings many years of experience in the storage industry with substantial experience in disaster recovery, enterprise data backup and data distribution. Prior to joining Data Domain, Mr. Patterson was the lead architect for Data Availability and Management where he defined and developed SnapVault™, NetApp’s first disk-based backup product, and drove the development of the NearStore product line. Earlier, Hugo was Quantum’s Chief Architect for the Programmable Storage Platform for network-attached disks.
  • Brian Biles — Founder and Vice President, Marketing — Brian Biles has spent more than 20 years in systems and software marketing. Most recently, he was the VP of Marketing and Business Development for VA Linux Systems, during which time their revenues went from $2.5 million per quarter to a peak of $56 million per quarter. While there, he provided leadership on VA’s NAS product, the first fully open-source NAS System. Prior to VA, he spent ten years at Sun Microsystems managing the direction of storage administration products, RAID, backup, and systems and network management products. He started his career in sales at Data General (subsequently acquired by EMC).

About Data Domain

Data Domain offers reliable, cost-effective data restoration solutions that enable enterprise customers to more easily manage enterprise data. Designed by renowned storage experts, the Data Domain solutions seamlessly integrate with industry-leading backup software applications and were designed from the ground up to optimize data protection. For more information on Data Domain products, visit www.datadomain.com.

Data Domain, the Data Domain logo, DD200, DD RPM and Global Compression are trademarks of Data Domain, Inc. All other brands, products, service names, trademarks, or registered service marks are used to identify the products or services of their respective owners.

Contact Information

Data Domain

Edward Luboja
914-698-1346
press@datadomain.com