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P R O D U C T P R O F I L E
Copyright
The TANEJA Group, Inc. 2008. All Rights Reserved
87 Elm Street, Suite 900 Hopkinton, MA 01748 Tel: 508-435-5040 Fax: 508-435-1530 www.tanejagroup.com
Does the SCO VTL perform data verification
to ensure that any retrieved data, after it is
converted back into its original form, exactly
matches the data that was originally written
by the application? How is this done? Any
system being evaluated for use in an
enterprise
environment
must
offer
independent data verification to ensure
conversion accuracy.
Solution maturity.
With a technology like
SCO, there is a learning curve for vendors.
Being further down on the learning curve can
translate directly into better performance,
higher scalability, and improved data
reliability. Look for vendors that have at
least hundreds of systems deployed in
production and can point to a number of
references whose environments look similar
to your own. Large enterprises often look for
very broad support coverage which can
address locations they may have on a
worldwide basis. Larger, more mature
vendors tend to offer better geographical
support coverage than smaller vendors.
IBM’s TS7650G: An Enterprise-
Class SCO VTL Solution
In April 2008, IBM announced the
acquisition of Diligent Technologies. With
their in-line SCO VTL gateway, Diligent had
already
achieved
considerable
success,
having established themselves as a leading
SCO VTL vendor to large enterprises. The
IBM acquisition puts the muscle of a trusted
storage supplier behind Diligent’s unique
and innovative ProtecTIER technologies.
IBM’s announcement of the TS7650G
ProtecTIER De-Duplication Gateway in
September 2008 represents the integration
of Diligent’s technology into IBM’s Tape
Systems product portfolio and includes
important new functionality for large
enterprises. With this release, IBM offers
clustering for high availability, supports a
global repository across cluster nodes, and
doubles
the
sustained
single
system
throughput of their SCO VTL to almost
1GB/sec – a number that clearly marks them
as the industry leader for in-line, single
system SCO VTL performance today. This is
a familiar position for them however, since
the previous version of the ProtecTIER
technology had the industry’s highest in-line,
single node throughput before it was
superseded by the TS7650G.
The ProtecTIER Technology
The TS7650G is a SCO VTL gateway based on
an IBM System x with 3 GHz, quad core Intel
processors and 32GB RAM, running Red Hat
Linux. Available in two models – a single
node or a dual node cluster – it supports FC
on both the front and back ends and
dedicated Ethernet connections for the
cluster communications. While the gateway
supports heterogeneous storage on the back
end, IBM has specifically qualified their own
storage subsystems, including the DS4000,
DS8000 and IBM XIV storage platforms, as
well as storage subsystems from EMC and
HDS.
HyperFactor is the patent pending de-
duplication technology that is used to
perform the capacity optimization. What is
so unique about this technology is that it is
based on an extremely efficient indexing
design that can map up to 1PB of base
