Aiming to knock another nail in tape's coffin, EMC has improved its Data Domain replication capability to chip away at another tape advantage.

Many data centres ship tapes between sites for disaster recovery (DR), with important data centres protected by two other sites and with remote data centres protected by a central one. Replicating data across network links between data centres is often done on a point-to-point basis, making it harder to protect a data centre with two DR sites.

The software now supports up to 180-to-1 remote site fan-in to a single controller for expanded automated cross-site deduplication. EMC says it also has up to 100 per cent faster directory replication throughput using optimised, multi-stream replication.

EMC cites Brian Babineau, an ESG senior analyst, who says: "According to our 2009 spending survey, the top storage investment enterprises plan to make is in replication for offsite data protection. It is clear that companies want to shift from transporting backup tapes as the primary means of moving data between multiple sites, so long as they can find an affordable disk alternative."

For customers that prefer to stay with tape, EMC will supply tape products sourced through Quantum.

NetApp has also been busy separately on the replication front. It has added compression to its SnapMirror thin replication product and claims customers can improve network bandwidth efficiency by up to 70 per cent. Bandwidth requirements for Exchange can be reduced by 33 per cent, Microsoft Home Directory by 63 per cent, and Oracle Database by 72 per cent. These numbers are based on NetApp's own testing. ®

Related stories

• Hitachi Data Systems reselling InMage recovery software (3 September 2009)
• EMC's Data Domain deal changes Quantum future (30 July 2009)
• IBM demonstrates dedication to deduplication replication (30 July 2009)
• Cisco and IBM come together over SAN WAN links (29 July 2009)
• Data Domain doubles up dedupe speed (20 July 2009)
• EMC wins Data Domain with $2.1bn offer (8 July 2009)