announced today that its nTierv80 Deduplication appliance achieved high accolades by OpenBench Labs following its recent . Using a tiered data protection test scenario, OpenBench found that Spectra’s appliance easily extends data protection operations of virtual tape libraries (VTLs) to physical tape libraries.

Spectra’s appliance provides both the advantages of a sophisticated disk-to-disk (D2D) backup as well as the traditional data security benefits of off-site tape storage and hardware-based encryption, utilizing its storage virtualization software and integrated VTL and physical library synchronization. By doing so, the appliance addresses IT needs including cost containment and simplified management in virtual server environments, meeting rigorous compliance mandates and service level agreements, and enhanced data security. 

“Organizations are looking to address the issues of data growth, resource utilization and compliance with government regulations for protecting and archiving data,” said , vice president of worldwide marketing and product management, . “With the data deduplication and VTL technologies that underlie Spectra’s nTier appliance, and our seamless disk-to-tape (D2T) integration, customers can meet these challenges with ease and efficiency – and save money in the process.”

The lab test revealed that Spectra’s appliance:

·         Maximizes the utilization of storage resources via the thin provisioning of virtual tape cartridges and data deduplication.

·         Maximizes backup performance with post-processing deduplication, which can be scheduled based on the length of time after a backup or on the utilization of virtual tape cartridges.

·         Minimizes backup windows using VTLs as surrogates for physical tape libraries by assigning physical tape libraries to VTLs and caching the barcodes and tape headers of tape cartridges located in the physical library.

·         Automates data caching of tape cartridges, which provides for copying backup data to physical cartridges for security, while maintaining local deduplicated cartridges on the VTL for quick recovery.

 

“The Spectra nTier appliance enables IT administrators to fully leverage the value of both virtual and physical tape resources while reducing the amount of data stored with deduplication,” noted Jack Fegreus, CEO of OpenBench Labs, who conducted the test. “The backup throughput and storage utilization gains were impressive and the automated data caching feature handled a steady stream of virtual machine backup data at 225 MB per second and the deduplication resulted in a net storage savings of 35-to-1.”  

To provide a virtual operating environment with a hierarchical infrastructure for backup, OpenBench Labs set up a Spectra nTier v80 appliance and a Spectra T50e physical tape library provisioned with two LTO-4 drives with 4Gbps fibre channel connections.  

The OpenBench testing platform used a data protection test scenario for a VMware vSphere environment that included two Dell PowerEdge 1900 servers; Symantec NetBackup software; a QLogic SanBox switch; a Xiotech Emprise 5000 system; and a Spectra T50e tape library.Virtual tape libraries using Spectra T200 and T50e libraries were also established to test deduplication of virtual machine backup images. 

Complete of the nTierv80 can be found at .