Anyone using Data Domain appliance?

[heybuzzz]

Anyone using data domain products want to share their like or dislikes? I'm looking at buy a DD510 to hold our production .vmdk snapshot instead of our SAN or NAS. Basically going to use VCB/ESX Ranger and the compress of the .vmdk using their de-dup technology, but I have never seen it in action just read all the docs (sounds great on paper). Anyone info would be much appreciated! Thanks

[kbk00]

My company is looking at the device (not sure which model) for our backup environment. It looks perfect for us and it does inline dedup which is nice...

Sorry, your post is a few months too early before I could write about our experiences. After you get it in, would you mind updating the post with your thoughts?

If you found this posting to be useful, great. I didn't waste your time.

[heybuzzz]

Will do... I was hoping a few people on here were already using it for dedup. I searched and found a few posts about how you shouldn't go by their sales pitch of 30 X because it just depends on your enviroment.

I like it because it seems like it's pretty easy to setup and manage...

[kbk00]

Right. It only holds when the same data keeps needing repeated backups. If that's not happening in someone's environment, one can't blame DataDomain. Seems unfair...

Hopefully someone will respond with some user experience.

If you found this posting to be useful, great. I didn't waste your time.

[heybuzzz]

Yeah, so would I. I know some people must be using their stuff.

[aguacero]

My company was evaluating but we decided go with FalconStor since DataDomain does the dedupe process on the wire which causes a bottleneck instead of waiting til it arrives on the box. My former company is using Data Domain and they are quite happy with it as far as my lst conversation with them.

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[kbk00]

Why do you think there's a bottleneck? With the hardware setup config (procs) they use there should be none. I'd like you to define that bottleneck a bit more, if you please. Did you see this with any demos you've done?

If you found this posting to be useful, great. I didn't waste your time.

[aguacero]

Yeah during our evaluation we saw some bottleneck-like issues. During one of our tests, one of our servers using the DataDomain took approximately 18-20% longer to dedupe (dedupe off the wire) as compared to FalconStor (dedupe on the box). One of my colleagues create various scripts to automate the process for our testing of our demo solutions and overall the FalconStor was better in majority of areas. One area that DataDomain won one was in pricing. FalconStore won on performance side of things.

When I last spoke with my old colleagues, they were truly satisfied in picking DataDomain as their solution over other vendors which did include FalconStor.

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[heybuzzz]

Gotta be better then just placing my .vmdk's on my NAS and using up like 100's of gigs...

[kbk00]

What about deduping that NAS?

We are using NetApp for that. works nicely.




If you found this posting to be useful, great. I didn't waste your time.

[heybuzzz]

Well it's basically just holding user home directories and other files. Not sure if I can just add dedup software to it now. Also, it's EMC so the software/support would probably run me more then a DataDomain DD510....

[heybuzzz]

Update... Been using the Data Domain DD510 for about 5 months now and it works great. I'm backing up 75 full VM's every night and see about 115 x on the compression/de-dup. Over 83,000 gigs of data backed up so far and my actual storage (1024 Gig) is only 63% full.... The restore feature is easy and quick and the file level feature is great.

[jamieorth]

heybuzz - we are having some issues with our DataDomain appliance. How are you attaching to the appliance, NFS mount to the esx hosts by chance?

Regards...

Jamie

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