“Deduplication” was one of the big buzzwords of 2009 as enterprises realized they were making backups of the same file many times over. Software and storage firms alike rushed to offer up software products to remove duplicates from backups and save space. Well, data deduplication now comes to the biggest iron from the biggest player: IBM mainframes. Enterprise Storage Forum has the details.
IBM (NYSE: IBM) is bringing data deduplication to its System z mainframes.
Big Blue is taking the dedupe technology from its Diligent acquisition and porting it to z/OS mainframe environments with the new System Storage TS7680 ProtecTIER Deduplication Gateway for System z. IBM claims as much as a 25 to 1 deduplication ratio for the new offering.
EMC’s (NYSE: EMC) Data Domain unit and Bus-Tech are two other data storage vendors that have dabbled in mainframe deduplication.
The TS7680 combines a virtual tape library (VTL) solution with an inline data deduplication algorithm called HyperFactor, which IBM said indexes the complete content of a repository and can be permanently hosted in the RAM because of its small size. The TS7680 also features two-node clustering and up to one petabyte of physical storage capacity per system.
