Insider’s Guide to 37 Midrange De-Dupe Appliances

The shift from tape to disk-based solutions for primary backup, coupled with the exponential growth in data for companies of all sizes, has placed the need for deduplication solutions to the top of the wish list for end users.

To help in the evaluation process, Data Center Infrastructure Group (DCIG), LLC and SMB Research LLC are providing users with the first in an annual Buyer’s Guide for Midrange Deduplication Appliances.

At a time when new solutions are introduced almost as quickly as redundant data is created within organizations, the latest Buyer’s Guide is designed to alleviate the time consuming and painstaking process of identifying possible solutions with an ‘at-a-glance’ comparison of some of the leading solutions which, in turn, will serve as a complement for deeper evaluations and due diligence needed to best determine a user’s specific need for their particular IT environments.

In collaboration, DCIG and SMB Research evaluated and ranked over 70 features from 37 different deduplication solutions in a multi-month process. Midrange solutions that have a starting price point ranging from $20,000 to $100,000 were researched, weighed, scored and ranked either ‘Best-in-Class,’ ‘Recommended,’ ‘Excellent,’ ‘Good,’ and ‘Basic’ across functionality and capability with the intent to provide an ‘at-a-glance’ comparison from which users can select the most appropriate solution for their existing needs.

"As an end user, it was one of the hardest things to do, source and find the latest information across a wide range of vendors offering key solutions to address my immediate and long-term needs," said Jerome Wendt, co-author and founder, DCIG, LLC. "For the past year, we have focused on providing Buyer’s Guides that help to alleviate the time, energy and wasted effort to identify appropriate solutions, before a deeper evaluation occurs. Our goal has always been to provide useful resources for end users to quickly compare and contrast leading solutions to help them narrow down their search efforts, and, hopefully find the right solution to best meet their needs. The need to eliminate redundant data will never go away. We feel strongly that having a resource for midrange solutions in an easy reference guide will ultimately help end users."

Key findings of the research
associated with this Buyer’s Guide include:

• All products compressed data after it was deduplicated
• 95% of the products verified data integrity after the data was deduplicated
• All of the products support the Symantec OpenStorage API (OST)
• More than 70% of the products only offer a single controller
• All natively offer deduplication software natively as part of their solution
• All of the products offered SATA 7.2K RPM drives
• All products offered an option to configure these SATA drives using RAID 6
• All products could deduplicate incoming data while replicating data to another system

The DCIG 2011 Midrange Deduplication Appliance Buyer’s Guide Top solutions include (in alphabetical order): EMC Data Domain, ExaGrid Systems, FalconStor Software, GreenBytes, HP Storage, IBM, Quantum and Spectra Logic.

The DCIG
2011 Midrange Deduplication Appliance Buyer’s Guide:

• Provides data sheets for 37 target-based deduplication appliances priced from $20,000 to $100,000
• Provides an overall ranking of these products
• Provides insights that will help end-users do thorough evaluations
• Lists deduplication appliance features and how they are supported
• Weights, scores and ranks the features on each product based upon the criteria that matter most to IT organizations
• Defines the terms used on the data sheets in the Appendix
• Provides recommendations on how to best use this Buyer’s Guide
• Provides contact information for each vendor

The products that achieved a ‘Best-in-Class’ or ‘Recommended’ ranking in the DCIG 2011 Midrange Deduplication Appliance Buyer’s Guide shared the following common features:

• They all support advanced forms of replication including ‘Fan-in’ and ‘Fan-out.’
• They all integrated with the leading backup software products
• They all offered 10GbE connectivity
• They could all encrypt deduplicated data
• They each offered the ability to create logical or physical partitions

"This market has been one of the hottest of late, as companies look to find cost-effective ways to optimize capacity and reduce redundant data," said Miles Prescott, managing director, SMB Research, LLC. "With this latest Buyer’s Guide, end users have access to targeted research and analysis to help them evaluate and find solutions that best meet their needs. For us, it has always been about the right research and analysis at the right time for the right reason. As end users continue to struggle to deal with explosive data growth and doing more with what they have already invested in, they will have a midrange deduplication appliance resource guide to help them."

Disclosure and Methodology
DCIG and SMB Research identified more than 20 plus companies that provide midrange deduplication appliance solutions. Each provider was given the opportunity to complete a survey with 70 questions that examined how its solution delivered on features associated with deduplication management, hardware, scalability, and support. In instances where vendors did not respond, DCIG and/or SMB Research completed the surveys on vendor’s behalf and then sent the completed survey to the vendor for them to review. In every case every vendor had the opportunity to review and respond to the survey and the information regarding their product displayed on the data sheets included in this Buyer’s Guide.

DCIG and SMB Research also spoke to various end-users to get a sense of how they would weight their needs in these various areas. They then evaluated the vendors’ capabilities by applying weighting indicated from our conversations with these end-users. No vendors, whether clients or not, were afforded preferential treatment in the Buyer’s Guide. All research was based upon information provided directly by vendors, research and analysis by DCIG and SMB Research, and other publicly available information.

The DCIG 2011 Midrange Deduplication Appliance Buyer’s Guide (62 pages) may be downloaded for no charge with registration.