Three Letter Words for Dedupe
In May 2008 IBM acquired Israel-based deduplication pioneer Diligent for $200 million. Prior to the purchase almost half of Diligent's business came from an OEM deal with Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) which uses Diligent in its Virtual Tape Library systems. HDS reportedly will continue to use Diligent software.
Also in May EMC debuted new deduplicating backup appliances that employ data deduplication technology from Quantum. The systems included:
- The Disk Library 3D 1500 and 3000. These are LAN connected disk-to-disk backup targets meant to connect to servers over a LAN. They use 1TB SATA drives and have capacities of 36TB (DL3D 1500) and 148 TB (DL3D 300). Using the Quantum deduplication software they can be configured to deduplicate data either as it is written to disk (inline) or after (post-process). Post process dedupe requires more disk space (because the data is written then deduped) but allows data to be received faster.
- The Disk Library 4000 VTL, which was previously available, was updated with the same Quantum deduplication software. This virtual tape library appliance is meant to attach to a SAN via Fibre Channel connections. The data deduplication option can also be added to existing DL4000 VTLs.