InfoStor : Sepaton delivers enterprise VTL with de-dupe, June 2008 Page 1

By Kevin Komiega

June 9, 2008—Sepaton today announced the S2100-ES2 Series 1000 virtual tape library (VTL), a new model of its data de-duplicating backup systems that will take its place atop the company's product family in terms of capacity, throughput, and de-duplication performance.

The S2100-ES2 VTL Series 1000 now includes 1TB disk drives, increasing capacity by 33%, and an enhanced version of Sepaton's DeltaStor software with multi-node de-duplication capabilities.

Using 1TB drives, the S2100-ES2 Series 1000 can store up to 1.6PB (previously 1.2PB using 750GB hard drives) per appliance. The VTL can scale to 16 nodes, resulting in backup-and-restore performance of up to 9,600MBps, or 34.5TB per hour, using 4Gbps Fibre Channel technology

Version 5.0 of Sepaton's DeltaStor de-duplication software features a new user interface that lets users choose the data they want to de-duplicate, rather than applying de-duplication to data pre-selected by the vendor. DeltaStor 5.0 also offers tunable de-duplication and a new set of custom reporting capabilities with views of de-duplication performance by backup names or cartridges.

According to Miki Sandorfi, Sepaton's chief technology officer, the VTL's ContentAware architecture, which captures detailed information about data from the backup stream, is the lynchpin that ties together the company's hardware and software technologies.

"The ContentAware architecture provides a mechanism that allows us to understand the content that's delivered to us beyond just blocks of data," says Sandorfi. "It allows us to build a fine-grained map of the content and where it lives in our file system and use that information as an enabler for all other functions of the system."

Sepaton is taking orders for the S2100-ES2 Series 1000 today, with pricing for the Series 1000 Rack Ready model starting at $69,000 for a configuration with 10TB of capacity. The DeltaStor 5.0 software is available as an option for the ES2 Series 1000.

Sepaton's vice president of marketing, Asim Zaheer, says the S2100-ES2 Series 1000 VTL and DeltaStor 5.0 software represent the "rounding out" of Sepaton's data-protection capabilities with de-duplication and multi-site replication. As far as future features, Sepaton has its eye on archiving and e-discovery.

"Over time, our intent is to enhance the data-protection environment with the ability to search and index content, and integration with data archiving platforms," says Zaheer.

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