Greetings from Dan

Greetings! This is my first post to our "Dedupe Matters" blog, and I am very excited for the opportunity to share my thoughts and experiences with you. Having spent nearly three years in the field as a Systems Engineer, I have seen firsthand the profound effect that Data Domain's technology has had on businesses of all sizes - from the first systems I installed, through my most recent deployment, which was a massive implementation at a Fortune 50 financial services firm. In relative terms, I guess I am a veteran of data deduplication. I have pretty much seen it all.

Prior to coming to Data Domain in 2006, I was a customer and was responsible for server and storage infrastructure for my employer. I deployed a Data Domain storage appliance as a target (via CIFS) for CommVault backups in my primary datacenter in Seattle, and then replicated the data to a second system 2000 miles away. CommVault was configured to be aware of both copies of data, and I was able to perform restores quickly from either one. As I monitored the system during backups, and saw how little of the inbound data was actually being written to disk, and how little bandwidth was needed to replicate, I was literally blown away.

Shortly thereafter, I sought out and accepted a position with the company, and moved my family across the country to New York City. There I found my enthusiasm for our technology countered by a healthy amount of skepticism from prospective customers. Dedupe was still new to many people and for much of my first year, discussions with prospects typically began with "dedupli...what?", followed by, "I don't believe that it works." Well, it's almost 2009, and a lot has changed: deduplication is being talked about everywhere, by almost everyone.

Much of the talk has focused on theoretical discussion, e.g. the architectural approach of one vendor vs. another. Without a doubt, this matters, yet I've found that what our customers really care about above all else, is getting to sleep at night knowing their data and business is protected by the solutions they invest time, money and human resouces in. Although this is common sense, it has become the mantra of our CEO, and our entire company, to deliver data deduplication that "just works." This is the number one reason for our success.

So in this spirit, I will share what I have learned about how our customers are using Data Domain's deduplication storage - how they have changed their backup policies, or their use of tape; how they've integrated us with different applications, implemented replication, and the ways that they perform disaster recovery. These are the things that mattered to them when choosing a solution, and through their collective wisdom, perhaps you'll find that dedupe matters to you, too.

Comments

[Tony Asaro]

Dan,

I am looking forward to participating in De-Dupe Matters. I would be interested to know what your old company was doing before de-dupe and sending data over a WAN.

Tony Asaro

[daniel budiansky]

Thanks Tony! Prior to implementing the Data Domain systems, backups in the primary data centere were directed to a tape library. Secondary copies were created and shipped offsite - to a DR location for critical applications, like email, and to a 3rd party storage site for everything else. I identified the risk to the business of this system early in my tenure there - media was expensive, backup and restore failures were common, and the DR process was built around shipping tapes, with many manual steps, and it wasn't being tested. At the same time, I began experimenting with using a small NAS system configured as a magnetic library in Commvault, targeting the nightly full SQL backups to it - while it worked OK, the system ran out of capacity long before the retention requirement was met, and I still had to copy all the data to tape to send offsite. Needless to say, I was looking for something better, and immediately saw the potential deduplication had to address these issues, when I was introduced to Data Domain in the fall of 2005.