Check out DataDomain they make a nice D2D product offering de-duplication and compression as well direct access via CIFS and NFS.

Check out the video on this blog:

 

We just bought a DataDomain solution and upgraded to 6.5.  It is being used as a basic disk storage unit with multiple directories on the DataDomain for backup destinations.

 

It has gone through 2 weekly fulls so far.  It has compressed or deduplicated data very well at this point.

 

We are NOT using it as a VTL.  It is connected to the backup server via seperate GigE connections.  It is slower than our IBM 3592 tape drives, but I am able to run 15 backups (or streams) at one time, so backups are still completed faster.  15 is not a limit, I have not had time to tweak anything yet and I wanted to start out modest.  Also, I have not had a chance to modify any of the recommended buffer settings either.  I hope to get more speed out of it with those changes.

 

Considering I would need (15) tape drives to do that many backups at once, the slower speed (at this point) is really nothing.  The seperate folders on the DataDomain are nice because the DataDomain will report compression statistics by folder.  I can see how SQL, Exch, file, or image (tiff) data is being "compressed" by folder.

 

We looked into various solutions and had ballpark weekly fulls of 3.5 tb's.  It is interesting because you buy a box that is not much bigger than your data and the first round of full backups takes up a lot of space on the device.  Compression kicks in and then dedupe with future backups, to minimize what actually takes up space.  This last weekly full barely made a dent in the space being used.

 

Chris