Wednesday, March 06, 2013

Data Domain vs. Protectier

Where I am currently employed we are looking to replace our 3592 based library with a deduplication solution. Currently the higher ups are leaning towards IBM ProtecTIER without having thoroughly investigated any other solutions. Having previously used Data Domain solutions at my previous employ I was somewhat concerned that the ProtecTIER solution would be a bad fit for our environment. I have had some run ins with people who have used IBM's ProtecTIER solution and when compared to those who have used Data Domain (including myself) you immediately see the difference in how they talk about the two products. So I was hoping to find a good write-up showing in-depth details comparing the two solutions and it took a blogger like me to provide a great comparison.  If you would like a good overview of how Data Domain and ProtecTIER stack up against one another in technology and performance check out the following link. It's very informative and solidifies why I would prefer using Data Domain.

Deduplication: Data Domain Vs. ProtecTIER Performance

One item that was not covered was the NFS capabilities of both. While I used VTL functionality with Data Domain, I was a HUGE NFS proponent. You can save a lot of money over a TSM TDP + LAN-Free solution using NFS with 10Gb Ethernet for your DB backups  (since IBM's licensing costs are still questionable). When I was first exploring ProtecTIER they did not yet have NFS capabilities, so I'd like to see a NFS performance comparison between the two products.

3 comments:

  1. I’ve been researching backup storage (separate from our enterprise storage decision).

    Practically speaking now would not be the time to replace TSM application with something like EMC's Avamar. That means just looking for a VTL like solution with enough capacity to handle our TSM backups.

    There are so many variances between vendor’s storage solutions.
    Like if I were to compare EMC’s DataDomain with IBM’s ProtecTier. How do I compare them?
    Since ProtecTier is solely a gateway then to compare with DataDomain I should choose its gateway version.
    But…it would be maybe inadvisable (what’s are other's opinions?) to backend a DataDomain gateway with highend storage like VMAX storage.
    So DataDomain practically speaking in our environment would need its own disk or the gateway version use the N-series we have now.
    What kind of storage matchup with ProtecTier to compare?
    Plus, there are sooo many midrange storage solutions.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Take care about your comparison! that this date in 2011!
    Things may have changed since then!
    Best Regards,
    Yann

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi,
    DataDomain and ProtecTIER are both excellent solutions. But we chose ProtecTIER after a Proof of Concept.
    We noticed the following (important) things:
    - We had very good flow rates for DataDomain but they were largely overwhelmed by ProtecTIER when there were multiple streams (65 % better during backup, 270 % better during restore)
    - ProtecTIER behaved better than DataDomain during TSM reclamation.

    We believe that ProtecTIER is the best VTL if your backup software is TSM.
    We have exceeded the limits announced by IBM on ProtecTIER (during Oracle backups on Exadata)

    ReplyDelete