Diligent Technologies

Enterprise data centers are facing a mounting problem in data protection. While demands for data availability increase, the sheer growth of data volume is pushing the infrastructure to the brink. Disk based data protection has recently emerged as a clear way to improve backup and recovery operations. But adding disk to the data protection infrastructure is expensive and as data volumes grow, the required capital expenditures grow dramatically. In just 3 years, most organizations will need over 12 times the data protection capacity they have today in their production environment. Simply increasing the disk capacity year-over-year is untenable. Only solutions that can solve the problem of dramatically growing data volumes will be economically viable over the next few years.

ProtecTIER: Changing the Game

Diligent Technologies’ ProtecTIER platform is the first enterprise-class disk-based data protection solution that enables customers to effectively increase the capacity of disk systems by 25 times or more. Powered by Diligent’s game-changing HyperFactor™ technology, ProtecTIER eliminates redundant data, radically reducing the amount and cost of physical storage required. The effect is dramatic. For the first time, the acquisition cost of a disk-based data protection solution is now BELOW that of an equivalent tape-based solution, without compromising performance, capacity, or 100% data integrity.

ProtecTIER Overview

ProtecTIER is a software data protection platform running on a standard enterprise server that connects to any standard Fiber-Channel attached disk array. These three elements combine to become a high capacity, high performance, and highly scalable target for backup and archive data.

Customer Benefits: Protect More. Store Less.

• Expand the use of disk-based data protection, allowing faster access to critical backup and archive data
• Accelerate backup and recovery times
• Increase backup reliability
• Improve productivity
• Radically reduce infrastructure costs
• Ensure 100% data integrity and availability
• Easily deploy without disruption
• Software platform allowing, higher capacity, higher performance and unmatched scalability

HyperFactor: Technological Breakthrough

At the core of the ProtecTIER platform is Diligent’s revolutionary new technology, HyperFactor, which effectively changes the economics and usage profile of disk-based data protection. HyperFactor is based on a series of algorithms that identify and filter out elements of data that have been previously stored by ProtecTIER. The effect is that only new data elements are stored on disk. Overtime, the impact is a 25X or more capacity increase of the physical storage capacity.

HyperFactor finds data matches with no I/O to the disk, utilizing a very efficient RAM-based index that maps the entire content of the disk target at a very fine resolution. The index allows HyperFactor to rapidly identify data matches, which in turn enables a very high system level data throughput rate. The index can map up to 1 Petabyte (PB) of physical storage utilizing just 4 GB of RAM on the ProtecTIER server. Thus, a single ProtecTIER server can protect a total of 25 PB of user data.

ProtecTIER VT: Next Generation Virtual Tape Solution

The first access module to the ProtecTIER platform is ProtecTIER VT, Diligent’s next generation virtual tape solution for open systems. ProtecTIER VT is a scalable and robust software solution that emulates tape libraries, enabling existing backup applications to send data to the ProtecTIER disk-based platform, rather than to tape. By leveraging the power of HyperFactor, ProtecTIER VT is the first virtual tape offering to utilize capacity optimization technology. Virtual Tape has recently emerged as the easiest, most effective method of deploying disk in the open systems data protection environment. With ProtecTIER VT, customers can capture all the known benefits of virtual tape, while radically reducing the capital costs associated with deploying large quantities of disk storage.

Changing the Economics of Disk-Based Data Protection

By enabling customers to get 25 times the capacity from a given amount of physical disk capacity, ProtecTIER has greatly changed the economics of data protection. Utilizing standard disk-based storage, customers have to balance the need for higher levels of data protection with the significant expense of large capacity disk arrays. With ProtecTIER, customers no longer must make this painful tradeoff. Analysis shows that both on an acquisition cost basis and a total cost of ownership (TCO) basis, a ProtecTIER solution is significantly less expensive than tape and disk alternatives, while offering higher levels of data protection. Thus, customers may greatly expand the use of disk in their data protection infrastructure, while significantly lowering costs.

Acquisition Cost Comparisons
Across a range of customer scenarios the total acquisition cost of a ProtecTIER solution is 15-30 % lower than that of a comparable tape library; and between 50-80% lower than that of a comparable virtual tape library system.

Flexible Architecture

ProtecTIER’s hardware agnostic, flexible architecture allows for unmatched scalability, with enterprise-class performance and redundancy. A ProtecTIER solution can scale in several ways to increase performance and capacity in a smooth, non-disruptive manner. Unlike closed appliances, this scaling is achieved through simple hardware configuration changes on the ProtecTIER server or the attached disk array, and does not require additional appliances or management points. In addition, up to four ProtecTIER servers can be clustered together to offer superior throughput performance and greater levels of hardware redundancy.

Ease of Implementation: Transformation with no Disruption

No other revolutionary technology has been so easy to deploy. ProtecTIER can transform your data protection environment with no disruption to your operations. After a few simple deployment steps, the ProtecTIER solution is connected to the backup servers, and the ProtecTIER VT devices are immediately available for use. Because data is routed via the ProtecTIER VT interface, users need only redirect existing backup jobs or policies to the ProtecTIER platform. Thus, customers can leverage the dramatic effects 25X disk capacity improvements without incurring any painful disruption or deployment effort.