Sepaton De-Dupes Customers

Sepaton is adding de-duplication technology to its virtual tape (VTL) appliances that the company says can reduce storage capacity needs by a factor of 25.

Sepaton’s DeltaStor software uses the company’s ContentAware architecture to greatly increase the amount of data that can be stored on a Sepaton S2100-ES2 VTL appliance by eliminating unchanged or duplicate data, allowing users to store more data online at much lower cost. When combined with compression technology, the software can deliver a storage capacity savings of 50:1, says Sepaton marketing vice president Linda Mentzer.

The de-duplication process occurs post-backup, so backup performance isn’t affected, Mentzer says.

Sepaton has used the technology in-house and achieved a 20:1 storage savings on SQL Server and 78:1 on Exchange, using de-duplication only, with no compression. The software works equally well on full and incremental backups, Mentzer says.

It also allows Sepaton VTL users to pack as much as 25 petabytes into a single appliance.

“Data de-duplication is probably the most important overall emerging technology in storage,” says Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “It enables things to happen which previously have been impossible. Combining de-duplication with content awareness is an outstanding idea that will make even more management and protection goals plausible.”

From built-in intelligence about file content and the backup formats used by leading backup software applications, DeltaStor software locates previously stored versions of data on any virtual cartridge in the VTL and compares the stored data to the latest backup set at the byte level. New duplicate data is stored and old duplicate data is replaced with pointers to the newer data.

Mentzer says Sepaton has shipped 2.4PB of storage to date to nearly 300 customers. The company’s roadmap will later include full content search and retrieval and discovery, she says.

The company’s competition includes Data Domain on the low end and Diligent in enterprises. Mentzer says Sepaton has fared well in high-end competition with Diligent.

Basic VTL pricing is $44,000 for 4.8TB appliance, and DeltaStor software licensing is priced at less than $1 per GB.

DeltaStor will be available for strategic customers this summer, with general availability in the fourth quarter for Symantec/Veritas NetBackup, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and EMC Legato Networker. Other applications will be added next year.

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