Virtual Tape Library (VTL) technology has shed it emerging technology status and has moved into the early mainstream. Early adopters have confirmed that VTL slips easily into existing environments while drastically improving the speed and reliability of backup and recovery. This ESG Lab report presents the results of hands-on testing of VTL solutions from Sepaton with a focus on the capacity savings that can be achieved with content-aware data de-duplication and the enterprise-class performance and scalability of the Sepaton grid architecture.
ESG Research1 indicates that organizations are turning to VTL solutions to take advantage of the highly touted benefits of a disk-based backup strategy: faster backups, faster recoveries and fewer media management headaches. Disk-based backup solutions supporting virtual tape library (VTL) technology provide another key benefit: ease of deployment. VTL slips easily and non-disruptively into existing environments—allowing customers to continue leveraging their existing backup software and policies. Sepaton uses a grid-based architecture to provide modular scalability and enterprise-class levels of performance. Scaling from an entry-level single-node system supporting 7 TB of disk capacity up to 16 nodes and 2 Petabytes (2,000 TB) of capacity, a Sepaton VTL solution is managed as a single virtual appliance. This grid-based approach provides the modularity needed to address a wide range of capacity and performance requirements as shown in Figure Two.
Recently, Sepaton VTL solutions have been enhanced to support data de-duplication. Data de-duplication is a valuable technology that removes redundancies in backup data so that more information can be costeffectively retained on disk for longer periods of time. Sepaton data de-duplication is implemented using a content-aware approach that understands the files within backup streams and post-processing technology for optimal backup and restore performance. These techniques—and more importantly, the capacity savings and enterprise-class performance that can be achieved with these techniques—are explored in this report.
ESG Lab performed hands-on evaluation and testing of S2100 Enterprise VTL solutions at Sepaton corporate headquarters in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Sepaton S2100 appliances present disk capacity to backup applications by emulating a tape library, as shown in Figure Three. The Sepaton S2100 can be configured to emulate a wide variety of popular tape libraries. From the perspective of the backup server, it looks and behaves just like a tape library.
Ease of Implementation and Management
Sepaton has recently focused on streamlining and simplifying the installation experience for the entrylevel S2100-DS2 appliance. ESG Lab testing was performed to confirm claims of consumer-level ease of installation for a VTL solution that can be configured from “box-to-backup” in 30 minutes or less.
ESG Lab Testing
ESG Lab reviewed the laminated instruction-sheet shown in Figure Four. Much like the instructions you would get with a new stereo or PC, the sheet provided simple, step-by-step instructions for unpacking, connecting cables and configuring the system. The final step, shown on the bottom right, is a screen shot taken during the wizard-driven software installation process using a Sepaton CD on a laptop.
The Sepaton installation wizard did most of the work unattended after providing standard network configuration parameters including IP addresses and a system name. A short 24 minutes after beginning the configuration on a pre-wired S2100-DS2 appliance, the VTL appliance was ready for the first backup. Data de-duplication enables organizations to reduce back-end capacity requirements by minimizing the amount of redundant data that is ultimately written to disk. Only unique data is stored. ESG Lab has spoken with a number of early adopters of data de-duplication technology that have experienced backup capacity reductions of 10, 20, 30 times and more. Sepaton claims that backup data stored on disk can be reduced by a factor of up to 50 to 1. That means an S2100 can store up to 500 TB of backup data on only 10 TB of disk. The Sepaton DeltaStor approach utilizes a number of powerful capabilities:
Content Aware
DeltaStor understands the format of the data sent by all of the major backup software vendors. The resulting file-level knowledge can be used to make intelligent decisions when looking for redundant data.
