VTL – Almost there!

Seven months after my first post about the VTL project and we have finally move all of the Windows backup jobs to the Data Domain. Ridiculous it has taken this long. We have also built a backup network using 1GB ethernet cards specifically to be used by database servers to backup to a CIFS shares on the Data Domain. Throughput and data depulications rates are looking great. I will post these stats in the future. The next step on the road to close out this project is to get tape out working properly.

VTL POC Continues

After several months of monkeying around with the EMC EDL, we scrapped the testing on that platform and had EMC install a couple of Data Domain DD880′s. The configuration consists of two DD880′s with about 100TB of storage in each. Windows and SQL backup testing is looking promising on the data dedup rates and throughput writing to the DD. SQL backups are configured to use a CIFS share created on DD and Windows server backups are configured to use traditional backup software with the DD emulating STK tape libraries.

Data dedup rates are up to 23:1 and throughput is more than 60MB/s.

Our VMS Team is now putting DD through it’s paces.

The Windows engineers are loving the solution and are hoping the VMS boys are as impressed so that we can close out the POC and move to the implementation phase.

Here’s the current design.

Backup Infrastructure POC Woes

The VTL POC continues. Since January we have been testing out EMC’s VTL solution to determine if it will satisfy all of the requirements we have for a tapeless backup infrastructure. The product works as adveritised except for replication throughput between source and target VTL’s. So, we are now looking at a DataDomain solution which claims high data deduplication rates and supports 10gb NIC’s which can be bonded into an aggregate NIC. More to come in future posts.