Nexsan Enters the DeDupe Fray
Nexsan and FalconStor have formed a joint venture leveraging each of their unique capabilities to deliver a robust deduplication solution to the data center. Nexsan is the pioneer of highly efficient, cost effective storage and FalconStor is the premier provider of open data protection solutions.
The combined team is delivering a co-branded solution that is a compelling addition to the deduplication market; the Nexsan DeDupe SG, a product offering high speed deduplication with the energy savings of power managed drives. Using an easy to deploy NAS interface the Nexsan DeDupe SG product family extends the capabilities of an existing backup process without the need to replace it. In a tight economy this is more palatable than replacing an entire backup software suite to gain one, albeit important, capability.
Monday, August 17, 2009
While most deduplication systems legitimately claim a green aspect of data deduplication because they can store the same amount of data is less physical space which leads to less power and space used on a per TB basis, until Nexsan they stopped short of showing real power efficiency savings because of power management.
Nexsan has a unique capability and one that we believe is a first in the industry; power managed deduplication. In the past because of the deployment strategies of other solutions, all the drives needed to remain active for the deduplication process to work effectively. The Nexsan solution is fast enough that the backup can be completed, deduplication clean up processes performed and the system ready to be spun down soon after the backup completes.
Assuming an eight hour backup window and one hour deduplication clean up window, that would still leave over 15 hours of time for the solution to spin down and go into idle mode. Of course the solution still gains all of the computed power efficiency that other deduplication solutions claim via more storage in less space calculations but then adding in the real power efficiency of powering down the system. Combined these two factors can lead, over the course of a year or even a few months, to a massive cost savings in electricity.
This power efficiency does NOT come at the expense of other capabilities that market leading deduplication solutions offer like block level deduplication, policy based processing for concurrent of post processing deduplication methods, and WAN optimized replication for creating electronic DR vaults across bandwidth constrained wide area connections.
The Nexsan DeDupe SG is access available via any CIFS or NFS mount points so as a result multiple applications can send data to the device. Even manual copies can be made to the device by using standard OS copy commands. This is critical. Despite the goal of some backup applications, in the real data center no one application is going to protect all the different applications that exist. Being able to have a unified target that any data protection or archive application can send data to is going to be far more practical than going through a difficult rip and replace and forced conversion to a single tool.
George Crump, Senior Analyst
Briefing Report
