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EMC offers cascading replication

Hopes to make lugging boxes of tapes a thing of the past

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.

EMC's Data Domain unit has added cascaded replication to its Replicator software, which enables the transfer of deduped data over low-bandwidth WAN links for disaster recovery-type purposes. The cascading means customers can extend replication of de-duped data to a third destination or to additional offsite locations.

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. ®

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