HP targets EMC with new deduplication technology

HP has announced a new deduplication-capable backup appliance which it claims is far superior to any comparable product from enterprise storage rival EMC.

The B6200 StoreOnce Backup System is based on HP's new Federated Deduplication Technology. According to David Scott, the Senior Vice President in charge of HP Storage and formerly of 3Par, rival deduplication products suffer from incompatible silos, restricted scalability, slow restore times and the need for manual intervention if something interrupts a backup.

Naturally the B6200 doesn't suffer from any of these disadvantages. It can apparently scale from 48TB to 768TB and from two to four controllers without any disruption to backups. HP claims backup and restore speeds of 29TB an hour and the Autonomic Restart feature can automatically restart an interrupted backup.

The Federated Deduplication technology is also finding its way into HP's software products. The new DataProtector Backup software apparently uses 90% less memory than rival applications from Symantec or CommVault, so it should be usable on older servers often relegated to branch offices and remote sites, but with a lower maximum theoretical throughput of 1.8TB an hour.

HP has yet to confirm exact availability and pricing for both the B6200 and DataProtector Backup.