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EMC 'boosts' Data Domain de-duplication speed by 50%

EMC announced at its annual user conference at Boston on Tuesday a new software add-on that increases the performance of its Data Domain appliance by an average of 50%.

Data Domain's new "Boost" software, which acheives the speed increase by offloading parts of its de-duplication process to backup servers and thereby freeing up CPU cycles, now only works with Symantec's NetBackup and Backup Exec backup software.

However, EMC plans to integrate the add-on with its own NetWorker software in the second half of this year.

While offloadding "finger printing," or the ability to identify duplicate data, to a data center's backup server sounds counter-intuitive, EMC said moving those functions to the media server means it, in turn, will send less data across the LAN to the Data Domain appliance. This reduces both the LAN bandwidth and appliance processing requirements.

The Boost feature on a Data Domain appliance can reduce backup traffic on the LAN by 80% to 90%, said PK Gupta, EMC's director of backup recovery systems for Asia, Pacific and Japan operations. As an example, EMC said a flagship Data Domain DD880 appliance's throughput increases to 8.8TB per hour with the Boost feature, from 5.4TB when the appliance was first introduced.

"The integration of backup software with de-duplication storage is not just about enhancing performance; it's about increasing functionality to enable a more streamlined and sophisticated user experience," Laura DuBois, a program director for storage software at research firm IDC, said in a statement.

PK Gupta, EMC's director of backup recovery systems for Asia, Pacific and Japan operations, admitted that until now, Data Domain's de-duplication appliance has been better integrated with competing backup software, "but that story is changing."

Gupta said Boost would be available for EMC's own Networker backup software later this year affording functions such as auto discovery, auto configuration, monitoring and reporting, which "are much better integrated with NetWorker than NetBackup."