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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
Evaluating Enterprise-Class VTLs: The IBM System Storage
TS7650G ProtecTIER De-duplication Gateway
September 2008
Increasingly stringent service level agreements (SLAs) are putting significant
pressure on large enterprises to address backup window, recovery point
objective (RPO), recovery time objective (RTO), and recovery reliability issues.
While the use of disk storage technology offers clear functional advantages for
resolving these issues, disk’s high cost has been an impediment to widescale
deployment in the data protection domain of the enterprise data center. Now that storage
capacity optimization (SCO) technologies like single instancing, data de-duplication, and
compression are available to reduce the amount of raw storage capacity required to store a
given amount of data, the $/GB costs for disk-based secondary storage can be reduced by 10 to
20 times. Virtual tape technology, disk-based storage subsystems that appear to backup
software as tape drives or libraries, are one of the most popular ways to integrate disk into a
pre-existing data protection infrastructure because they require very little change to existing
backup and restore processes. While virtual tape libraries (VTLs) are interesting, SCO VTLs
that leverage data de-duplication and other related technologies are compelling.
Given high data growth rates, stringent SLAs for data protection, and the need to contain
spending, enterprise customers really need to take a look at SCO technologies. Taneja Group
predicts that large enterprises will rapidly move to SCO VTLs over the next 1-2 years while the
market for non-SCO VTLs (VTLs that do not have integrated SCO technologies) dwindles
rapidly. Data growth rates in the 50% - 60% range will be pushing this transition as much as
will the clear cost advantages that SCO VTLs offer over non-SCO VTLs. While SCO is a key
requirement, performance remains the number one need of the enterprise data protection
environment. After all, if the SLA for completing the day’s backup cannot be met, all other
criteria are moot. This has significant implications for vendors of SCO VTLs. Their solutions
must provide the capacity optimization that the enterprise customer demands, while enabling
enterprise-class performance. Vendors that can provide both efficient SCO technology and
enterprise class performance offer a very compelling value proposition.
In this Product Profile, we discuss the criteria we recommend be used to compare and contrast
enterprise-class SCO VTL solutions from different vendors, and then evaluate how the IBM
System Storage TS7650G ProtecTIER De-duplication Gateway performs against these criteria.
The TS7650G, IBM’s first offering based on technology from the April 2008 acquisition of
Diligent Technologies, supports very high single system throughput, multiple PBs of usable
capacity, and optional clustering with support for a global de-duplication repository - all
important considerations for enterprise SCO VTL prospects.
