University of New Hampshire Deploys Sepaton DeltaStor De-Dupe Software

SEPATON, Inc. announced that the University of New Hampshire (UNH) has completed the deployment of a SEPATON S2100-ES2 virtual tape library (VTL) and DeltaStor software for data deduplication as a primary component of its consolidation effort.

The University is combining two separate backup and recovery environments into a single newly architected disk-based storage infrastructure.

According to Bob Rader, storage and backup manager for the University of New Hampshire, “Our new VTL solution powered by SEPATON delivers cost savings in several ways. For example, it allowed us to eliminate old, inefficient backup devices and tape libraries, along with their costly annual maintenance fees. Because we get better than expected deduplication ratios with DeltaStor, we won’t have to add capacity to our new VTL for a full year. Third, we scored big performance gains that enable us to backup three times more data within each backup window as we did with our old tape-based system. We have been very pleased with the results of our investment.”

The University purchased an S2100-ES2 with one processing node (called a SEPATON Replication Engine) containing four disk shelves with 30 TB of usable space, along with DeltaStor software. It took only a half day to get the system from the crate, to a fully configured system performing backups. The grid architecture of the system will allow it to scale to multiple nodes for future investment protection.

The University has as many as 100 backup clients running throughout any given night with as many as 20 backups running concurrently. Many of these clients are running Windows, which operates five to ten times slower than their Linux or Unix clients, explained Rader. Slow clients can impede the performance of physical tape drives by causing a phenomenon known as the ‘shoe-shining’ affect as tapes stop and start waiting for data to stream from these servers. VTLs eliminate this issue. “The SEPATON VTL gives us much more flexibility to run many more concurrent backups while maintaining high performance. While the system can achieve performance rates of 600 MB/second/node, our backup environment is only taking advantage of 200 – 250 MB/s of that total in order to accommodate the slower performance of our Windows clients. This means we could run quite a few more concurrent backups, if necessary. Our data sets average 1.5 TB nightly and 12 TB weekly.”

UNH deduplicates a wide range of data types including Microsoft Exchange, Oracle databases, and unstructured data such as Unix and Windows file systems. The University calculated that it needed to achieve capacity reduction ratios of only 6:1 to meet their ROI objectives. Not surprisingly, DeltaStor earned higher ratios providing plenty of headroom for future growth.

“We are only using 60% of the capacity of the VTL at present with DeltaStor,” remarked Radar. “Our investment worked out even better than we had calculated. We estimate we can use our current hardware without a capacity upgrade and achieve 50% more growth out of the same system.”

“Data volumes grow despite economic cycles. Prudent organizations need to plan for the future and invest in technologies that reduce costs over the long-haul,” said Jay Kramer, vice president of worldwide marketing, SEPATON, Inc. “Results such as those that UNH has earned are typical for SEPATON customers focused on completing backups within the backup window, ensuring the flexibility to efficiently grow a solution, and achieving cost containment for the overall data protection investment.”