DCIG is pleased to announce the availability of its DCIG 2013 Midrange Deduplicating Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide. In this Buyer’s Guide, DCIG weights, scores and ranks 46 midrange deduplicating backup appliances respectively from ten (10) different providers. Like all previous DCIG Buyer’s Guides, this Buyer’s Guide provide the critical information that all size organizations need when selecting a midrange deduplicating backup appliance to help protect their fast growing data-intensive applications.
The storage volume necessary for digital media is already at incredibly high levels and the rate of growth is not slowing down. Predictions by Gartner show information managed by enterprise data centers will increase 50 times from 2011 to 2015. A similar statistic issued by IDC estimates that the amount of data reached more than 1.8 zettabytes in 2011. IDC even recently upwardly revised that earlier forecast to now estimate that by 2020 more than 40 zettabytes of information will exist in the digital universe.
As such, organizations need smarter ways to address the problem of these runaway storage volumes. Deduplication technology fills this important gap by providing storage reduction ratios of 10 – 20 times of what can be achieved using standard storage technologies. Given the ever-growing need for more storage, it should come as no surprise that purpose built backup appliances (PBBAs) such as deduplicating backup appliances poised for large growth.
Recently issued 1QCY13 statistics from IDC show the PBBA market is growing faster than all other areas of the external disk storage and data protection markets. PBBAs are increasing at 17% quarterly year-over-year and shipments have increased by 45% on a year-over-year basis.
Deduplication–maybe more than any other technology–has transformed the backup storage space. Other technologies like thin provisioning, utility computing and virtualization have promised and largely delivered high levels of costs savings and operating efficiency in many environments. However, deduplicating PBBAs often provide these types of results almost immediately in nearly every organization into which they are introduced.
Deduplication may be implemented at the source, the target or both in the backup process, but target deduplicating PBBAs are generally the least disruptive to introduce and may be installed into an existing backup environment. They provide the key features that organizations need today more than ever as they enable organizations to:
- Deduplicate data after it is already backed up
- Non-disruptively introduce data deduplication into their backup environment
- Optionally deduplicate data on the server – physical or virtual – using “upstream processing” that divides the deduplication between the server and the appliance
- Non-disruptively perform routine maintenance and upgrades
- Perform reliably
- Scale predictably
- Start small with only the capacity and performance that they need with the flexibility to grow larger
The ability of deduplicating midrange appliances to deliver on most if not all of these features is particularly important for those organizations that opt to implement private cloud storage arrays to host many and/or all of their production applications. When deployed into these environments, any planned or unplanned downtime or disruption in service at any time for any reason can have potentially catastrophic consequences for the entire business.
It is in this context that DCIG presents its 2013 Midrange Deduplicating Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide. As prior Buyer’s Guides have done, this Buyer’s Guide puts at the fingertips of organizations a comprehensive list of midrange deduplicating backup appliances and the features they offer in the form of detailed, standardized data sheets that can assist them in this important buying decision.
The 2013 Midrange Deduplicating Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide accomplishes the following objectives:
- Provides an objective, third-party evaluation of currently available midrange deduplicating backup appliances
- Evaluates, scores and ranks midrange deduplicating backup appliances from an end-user’s perspective
- Includes recommendations on how to best utilize this Buyer’s Guide
- Provides standardized data sheets for each of the 46 midrange deduplicating backup appliances from ten (10) different providers so organizations may do a quick comparison of features while having sufficient detail at their fingertips to make an informed decision
- Provides insight into each deduplicating backup appliance’s robustness of its hardware, what deduplication options it offers, and what levels of support and integration it offers for various backup software solutions
The DCIG 2013 Midrange Deduplicating Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide Top 10 solutions include (in alphabetical order):
- ExaGrid Systems EX13000E
- NEC HYDRAstor HS8-3004R-24-48
- NEC HYDRAstor HS8-3004S-24-48
- NEC HYDRAstor HS8-3010R
- NEC HYDRAstor HS8-3020R
- NEC HYDRAstor HS8-4002R-192
- NEC HYDRAstor HS8-4002S-96
- NEC HYDRAstor HS8-4006R-720
- Quantum DXi6802
- Quantum DXi8500 Enterprise
In doing its research for this Buyer’s Guide, DCIG uncovered some interesting statistics about midrange deduplicating backup appliances in general:
- 100% of appliances provide the option to use variable length block as a means to deduplicate data
- 96% natively include deduplication software with the appliance
- 96% verify data integrity in some way after the data is initially deduplicated
- 85% support 10GbE ports
- 68% deduplicate data inline
- 56% display deduplication ratios by backup job name
- 40% deduplicate data post-process
- 38% support 8Gb FC ports
- 19% give users the option to deduplicate data either inline or post-process
The DCIG 2013 Midrange Deduplicating Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide is available immediately. It may be downloaded for no charge with registration by following this link.