Comment I use a competitors product at work.. (Score 1) 438
I use a pair of similar devices at work, and they do get the job done for what they're designed to do--backups. If you're not saving the same data over and over again, then you'll never see any better compression than what you'd get with gzip.
The drives are typically set up over NFS of CIFS as a disk based storage addition to your backup software (think NetBackup or Networker here). Our environment is currently seeing about 15x compression over our retention period. Increasing that retention period would increase our ratio.
If you're thinking about getting one of these, keep in mind that an initial full backup of your environment will have to fit into the native storage on the device. The savings are seen when you do your next full backup, and the next, and the next. But if you're trying to fit 5TB native onto a 3TB storage device, you'll never even get off the ground.
The drives are typically set up over NFS of CIFS as a disk based storage addition to your backup software (think NetBackup or Networker here). Our environment is currently seeing about 15x compression over our retention period. Increasing that retention period would increase our ratio.
If you're thinking about getting one of these, keep in mind that an initial full backup of your environment will have to fit into the native storage on the device. The savings are seen when you do your next full backup, and the next, and the next. But if you're trying to fit 5TB native onto a 3TB storage device, you'll never even get off the ground.
