Guest Post by Chuck Dufresne, Sr. Technical Marketing Manager, EMC Backup Recovery Systems
In the automotive industry, the word, “boost” is “a loose term for turbo or supercharger.” It describes positive manifold pressure in automobile engines that increases horsepower and performance. If you have ever driven a car with a turbo you can attest to the dramatic acceleration experienced when the turbo kicks in.
There are times when we all would like a boost and experience the exhilaration of accelerating past our limitations and increasing our performance. With the explosion of data that needs to be managed and protected, storage and backup administrators are looking for an extra edge that will help them accelerate their backup workloads so that they can satisfy their SLAs despite shrinking backup windows. EMC Data Domain Boost software provides the special sauce needed to accelerate your backups and turbo-charge your recovery point and recovery time objectives without disrupting your existing backup infrastructure.
With the recent announcement of DD Boost for Oracle Recovery Manager EMC expanded the growing collection of DD Boost enabled backup solutions with DBA controlled, accelerated Oracle backup, recovery and disaster recovery.
In a nut shell, DD Boost extends the optimization capabilities of Data Domain systems and significantly increases backup performance by distributing parts of the deduplication process to the backup server or application client so that only unique data segments are sent to the Data Domain system. Since it takes fewer server resources to perform distributed deduplication than it does to push all backup data across the network, DD Boost saves valuable resources on the backup or application server and precious network bandwidth. DD Boost also simplifies disaster recovery by integrating with Data Domain Replicator software to automatically and transparently copy only unique and compressed data across existing network links to the remote system, for faster, “time-to-DR” readiness.
In addition to performance, DD Boost increases the reliability of the backup to ensure recovery through the Data Domain Data Invulnerability Architecture by generating checksums on the data before it is sent to the Data Domain system. As the Data Domain system ingests the data, it computes a new checksum and compares it to the values from DD Boost to ensure end-to-end verification of the data. The checksums are stored alongside the unique data that lands on disk for continuous online verification, continuous fault detection and healing and other resiliency features (see blog from March 14th for more information).
You would think this would be enough, but there is more… DD Boost also improves reliability and performance with advanced load balancing and link failover. Multiple 1GbE or 10GbE links can be aggregated from a backup or application server to the Data Domain system so that backup and restore jobs are automatically distributed and balanced on multiple ports on the Data Domain system. Should an interface fail, in-flight jobs on failed ports are automatically and transparently moved to healthy network links.
EMC Data Domain Boost is available for the majority of the backup software market – EMC Avamar, EMC NetWorker, and Symantec NetBackup and Backup Exec – and leading database utilities – Oracle RMAN and EMC Greenplum.
Give yourself and your backups a boost up with EMC Data Domain Boost turbo-charged backups!
For more information on EMC Data Domain Boost visit this web page.
