Data Domain Project

Shing Digital’s Client (a mid-sized oil and gas company) needed a solution that could deal with large amounts of geophysical data and two separate data centers. Their primary backup was to disk, followed by a replication to tape. The disk-based backup was providing deduplication; however, was limited to per backup job. A disk unit was located in each data center with mutual replication, but the replication consumed too much bandwidth, negatively effecting regular data traffic. The replication to tape (LTO5) was also taking upwards of one week.

Shing Digital’s solution was to replace their existing disk based backup appliances with two Data Domain 6300s utilizing the same backup software (Quest NetVault). The Data Domains provide global deduplication across all backups jobs via DD Boost and across NFS/CIFS shares. During replication, the Data Domains will check for duplication across appliances to ensure that only unique blocks of data are sent across the WAN.

Currently, with the same backup software, we have achieved 25x deduplication versus the 4x on the previous disk appliance. The reliability of the replication has allowed the Client to minimize the role of the tape backups to a single backup job which required special handling.