So who does five full backups a week? Nobody. If you are doing five full backups a week then don't buy the Sepaton product, swap to doing one full back up a week and nightly incrementals which should save you even more space at no cost.

What the dickens is "de-duplication" ???

Imagine you have an large Oracle database server (or any DB server) which has several large databases running from it - say they are 50GB each.

If you back them (usually) as full backups every day then after say, five days you'll have 250GB of data on tape.

If you back them up with a de-duplicating VTL after five days you'll have 50GB stored on the virtual tape. (assuming there are no changes day to day)

Of course, in the real world there are changes, but the VTL will only write the changes to its storage and track these changes in its own database.

That's one example - there are many others of course where dedupe makes perfect sense, both operationally (you only store deduplicated data so if replication is required then you onlly replicate a fraction of the backups) and from a cost and admin perspective (keeping petabytes of data on tape in huge silos plus the manual costs of copying them to offsite storage.)

<pulls up comfy chair>

Tim

Don't they mean "Bulk Reduction"? Any fool can achieve a capacity reduction, just by removing some media. Illiterate morons.

They're de-duping tuesday's backup against monday's one, which in my mind is making tuesday's backup is an incremental of mondays one. Hell everyone knows that a 30 day incremental cycle will use a whole lot less storage than 30 full backups.

What they don't say though is that a full backup requires a larger backup window than an incremental (most of the time anyway) so you have to spend more money to get a less efficient backup....

This is no different then the NetApp Guarantee! Sepaton requires you to have a minimum of 5 full backups a week (from my experience most applications are only fully backed up once a week these days, with incremental and or differential backups daily).

Now I will concede that there are very good features within Sepaton and there will be savings on capacity used, but it looks like most of these will be coming from so many repeat "disk images" from daily backup policies.

Regards,

Steven Schwartz

thesantechnologist.com