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DD vs CV vs vDR

T

Thuleman

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Apr 13, 2004
Messages
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So I was considering to buy a Data Domain DD140 when a guy who's opinion I trust said that they are terrible in terms of being a licensing rip off compared to CommVault. This then makes me wonder whether I should just stick to the de-dup that vDR provides.
 
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Three years ago I put in a datadomain 565 with commvault combo. The data domain was a single license and very competitive pricing for the absolutely huge storage you get. The commvault licenses were expensive (tons of license types). Hope this helps.
 
The DD appliances are great, if they fit your requirements. They aren't cheap, but that doesn't mean they are overpriced.
 
CommVault gets HORRIBLE deduplication ratios compared to data domain. We were seeing 20:1 or so on the data domain for backups, and we didn't buy it MUCH for the same reason you're saying here. The CommVault sales people are great liars. We maybe saw 3:1 or 4:1 ratios? The deduplication isn't inline either unless you buy the agents to do it. Otherwise it is regular non-deduped backup to storage, then deduped to tape or whatever via what they call an aux copy.

CommVault is great for backups, but the deduplication sucks. I think all software deduplication pales in comparison to hardware based dedupe.
 
I've heard from several customers that the CV dedupe isn't good. I don't use it myself but I keep hearing the same. The dedupe on DD and also Avamar is great. My customers rave about them. The most common setup we see is NetBackup/BackupExec + Data Domain. That's a great combo now with the "DDBoost" add-on option for BackupExec.
 
NetJunkie said:
I've heard from several customers that the CV dedupe isn't good. I don't use it myself but I keep hearing the same. The dedupe on DD and also Avamar is great. My customers rave about them. The most common setup we see is NetBackup/BackupExec + Data Domain. That's a great combo now with the "DDBoost" add-on option for BackupExec.
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Well, I say they're great liars, but what I mean is they promised themselves purple that it would be "just as good". What a joke, I cannot believe my management at the time believed them. Sales people are constantly "stretching" the truth, so it should have been taken with a grain of salt. I guess that isn't possible when the sales guys are also your CTO's golf buddies. We demoed the data domain because they didn't want to spend the money in the first place, and it delivered, then they chose to ignore that and buy CommVault without even so much as a try and buy. Quite stupid. My eyes got big when I saw this post on here, very surprising to see someone else debating the same question. Hopefully my ranting helped, a little.

I just say, proof is in the pudding, don't buy anything if you don't see results first hand.
 
It appears that the "sell" on the CommVault solution is that you are re-purposing existing storage hardware and thus the overall cost to do de-duped backups is lower as opposed to buying a hardware appliance, even if the CV de-dup ratio is lower.
 
Another option to throw in the mix is the newish Netbackup Puredisk appliances. They integrate directly into the netbackup replication visibility.

The datadomain licensing is pretty hefty once you add in the replication(10Kish) and boOST(6K) licenses.
 
My main complaint about any of this is that it's so tricky to figure out licensing details without going to a VAR. I don't mind VARs, and I'd go to one when I am actually having the funds to implement this and have them advise me on whether I should do this or do that. However, in the phase prior to funding being allocated I don't want to have to go to a VAR. I don't want to suck up their time with something that may or may not get funded, but unless I do that there's no way for me to even remotely accurately budget or in some cases even know about options/functionality.

I think that system is broken and manufacturers should be more forthcoming with product details, licensing schemes, MSRPs. Then again, if they were to do that then perhaps some VARs would have a lot less business and a lot less spiff. I don't know, all I know is that it's bugging me.
 
Thuleman said:
My main complaint about any of this is that it's so tricky to figure out licensing details without going to a VAR. I don't mind VARs, and I'd go to one when I am actually having the funds to implement this and have them advise me on whether I should do this or do that. However, in the phase prior to funding being allocated I don't want to have to go to a VAR. I don't want to suck up their time with something that may or may not get funded, but unless I do that there's no way for me to even remotely accurately budget or in some cases even know about options/functionality.

I think that system is broken and manufacturers should be more forthcoming with product details, licensing schemes, MSRPs. Then again, if they were to do that then perhaps some VARs would have a lot less business and a lot less spiff. I don't know, all I know is that it's bugging me.
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Well, once you're ready to spend money if something works, get the VAR to let you use a demo unit. Or perhaps do a try and buy. I can't stress enough that if you can't try it, or witness it working well in another similar environment to yours, then you're taking a big risk.
 
DDs seems to have better dedupe engine compared to CV. CV shows acceptable ratio for a very limited scenarios. Shared storage for hypervisor is OK, backup appliance is OK but say keeping SVN archive on it was a bad idea in our case. I'm not a specialist but looks like DD is a bit more intelligent in finding the same data inside the flie and CV implementation cares about logical block aligned offset only. ZFS is pretty much like CV BTW.

Olga

Thuleman said:
So I was considering to buy a Data Domain DD140 when a guy who's opinion I trust said that they are terrible in terms of being a licensing rip off compared to CommVault. This then makes me wonder whether I should just stick to the de-dup that vDR provides.
Click to expand...
 
Thuleman said:
My main complaint about any of this is that it's so tricky to figure out licensing details without going to a VAR. I don't mind VARs, and I'd go to one when I am actually having the funds to implement this and have them advise me on whether I should do this or do that. However, in the phase prior to funding being allocated I don't want to have to go to a VAR. I don't want to suck up their time with something that may or may not get funded, but unless I do that there's no way for me to even remotely accurately budget or in some cases even know about options/functionality.

I think that system is broken and manufacturers should be more forthcoming with product details, licensing schemes, MSRPs. Then again, if they were to do that then perhaps some VARs would have a lot less business and a lot less spiff. I don't know, all I know is that it's bugging me.
Click to expand...

I work with customers to get budget numbers all the time. We're aware that not everyone is ready to cut a PO and that you need to do budget requests. Certain times of the year that's the majority of what I do.

The thing about backup solutions like DD is that there is work that has to be done to size it. It's usually not hard or time consuming, but unless you know how you won't be able to tell which appliance you actually need. Usually when I size a DD (which is pretty rare..not my area) we get the amount of data of different types (database, unstructured, exchange, etc), what your retention requirements are, what your backup windows will be, etc and run it through a tool. It'll tell us which appliance fits you best and then we quote it.

If you want really precise sizing then we can do a full-on assessment and actually look at dedupe ratios on YOUR data..but usually that's done as a final step before a big purchase.
 
You have to be careful with Commvault. There are 2 different de-dupe levels, object and block.

SImpana 7 only supports object but 8 and 9 support block as well. We were getting about 3 or 4:1 on object level de-dupe only after upgrading from 7 to 8 but the money they wanted to go up to block was crazy.

I really like Commvault but their licensing model is mental, you need a seperate license to do pretty much anything.
 
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