F5 and Data Domain have joined their respective solutions, forming a partnership designed to assist customers in deploying and realizing the benefits of tiered storage. By combining F5’s tiered storage policy engine with Data Domain deduplication storage systems, mutual customers can realize the benefits of deploying tiered storage and, importantly, see dramatic reductions in the costs of storage.
F5 and Data Domain Partner to Curb Storage Costs Date: January, 2009 Author: Terri McClure, Analyst and Lauren Whitehouse, Analyst Abstract: It isn't feasible to save all of your file data on high performance, expensive file servers. These Tier 1 storage systems are great for transactional content, but are too expensive for inactive or archived data. F5 and Data Domain have joined their respective solutions, forming a partnership designed to assist customers in deploying and realizing the benefits of tiered storage. By combining F5's tiered storage policy engine with Data Domain deduplication storage systems, mutual customers can realize the benefits of deploying tiered storage and, importantly, see dramatic reductions in the costs of storage.
Overview No one can argue the benefits of tiered storage-deploying systems with various cost characteristics and aligning the value of data with the cost to store it. A piece of content may be stored on any number of storage tiers over the course of its lifecycle. One of the biggest challenges in deploying tiered storage, however, is the fear that moving data across different storage systems will disrupt access. Tiered storage deployments also cause another concern for storage staff: dealing with the growing amount of data stored on secondary devices. Most data is not changing and rarely accessed, yet it is kept on high performance, expensive file servers. Companies should archive or migrate inactive data to less expensive devices in order to control costs. Thirty-seven percent of organizations recently surveyed by ESG said that their file archives are going to grow over 20% per year. This trend could equate to significant growth in storage costs and data 1protection inefficiencies unless companies find a better way to retain and manage their information. It is easy to solve these problems independently. When moved with a solution such as F5's ARX series, data ends up on lower cost, dense storage systems without disruption to file access. With so much file data proliferating across today's enterprises, F5 ARX solves a big problem. Now, customers are dealing with the next challenge-how to optimize utilization of the many newly created secondary storage systems full of archived files. IT departments are quickly introducing systems that deduplicate redundant content, helping to improve utilization of secondary storage. Buoyed by its inline deduplication technology and remote replication solutions, Data Domain's portfolio has become a common secondary storage tier. Data Domain and F5 realized that, together, they could help customers deploy tiered storage in file environments and dramatically reduce storage costs with deduplication. The combination of the two technologies can deliver considerably greater storage efficiencies than deploying each product separately.
About the Partnership Before discussing the partnership, it's important to understand what each company does. F5's ARX product offers a robust set of data management policies that can move file data between storage tiers based on age, type, and size-amongst other criteria. ARX performs migrations transparently; there is no impact to users, thanks to a global namespace that abstracts the file's network name from the physical file location. Customers can use the ARX to migrate files that are subject to record retention requirements, non-transactional or unchanging in nature, or simply old but still containing useful data, to the most appropriate storage system. This allows customers to store data on the most cost-effective storage media while still meeting data access requirements for users. Data Domain offers storage systems that deduplicate data inline, before it is written to the system. Customers can move or copy data to Data Domain systems using standard NAS file system interfaces (NFS or CIFS), via a 1 Source: ESG Research Report, 2007 File Archiving Survey, December, 2007.
Copyright 2009, The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved. ESG Brief Page 2 Virtual Tape Library (VTL) interface using Fibre Channel (FC) or with the NetBackup OpenStorage interface. As a result, many organizations have used Data Domain as a disk-based ... [download for more]
