Lab Insight: High-Performance Backup in Enterprise Environments

Data protection continues to be one of the most important aspects of IT operations for a variety of reasons. Evaluator Group recently completed an in-depth survey and analysis of more than one hundred enterprise information technology professionals regarding their strategies, goals and plans for data protection. Many insights may be gleamed from the research although one aspect that stands out is the fact that traditional backups are still the leading method for protecting data, while cloud offerings such as “Backup as a Service” are deployed at significantly lower rates.

Additionally, Evaluator Group’s research indicates that a significant majority of respondents include the use of tape as a part of the current data protection operations, and nearly a third intend to continue using physical tapes. With the natural affinity between virtual and physical tapes, virtual tape library (VTL) products enable disk performance with tape like operations. For other firms moving away from tapes, native file-based backup targets such as NFS, SMB or other file like protocols may be more appropriate. Moreover, it is clear that disk backup targets with both file and VTL interfaces can play an important role in current and future enterprise data protection strategies.

In this Lab Insight, Evaluator Group analyzed FalconStor’s backup target in a test scenario designed to represent an enterprise environment. A leading, enterprise backup application was configured to backup multiple systems with a single FalconStor VTL system as the target. The enterprise backup application was configured to utilize the FalconStor via FC connectivity with the system presenting multiple virtual tape libraries, tape drives and media. Multiple Terabytes of file data was created resulting in data with an overall 7:1 reduction rate, consisting of duplicate and compressible data.

A single FalconStor VTL system was able to achieve an aggregate backup rate of nearly 40 TB/hr. This was achieved utilizing an industry standard 2 socket system, along with multiple FC cards, back-end FC attached storage for retention and FalconStor VTL software.

FalconStor VTL Performance:

•  Single node VTL delivered a nearly 40 TB/hr backup rate
•  Price / Performance of 3X – 6X better than a leading competitor
•  Design provides data protection that scales with additional CPU and I/O channels
•  Architecture enables independent scaling of VTL processing, storage performance and capacity

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