Quantum has long been in the business of resource efficiency, in fact we pioneered and own the patent for variable length deduplication, by far the most efficient approach to data deduplication on the market today. This innovation in efficiency is continued in Quantum vmPRO with Progressive Optimization™. It’s goal : reduce your data protection workload, reduce bandwidth requirements, save time and use space efficiently

vmPRO’s patented Progressive Optimization works directly with VMware’s Change Block Tracking (CBT) to reduce the overall file size sent to the backup target and to reduce the amount of data read from disk. While CBT provides a list of incremental changed blocks to be protected, vmPRO’s Progressive Optimization examines the file allocation table of the file system of the VM being backed up and skips reading deleted, unassigned or inactive blocks , reducing the amount of disk I/O performed. [See “vSphere changed Block Tracking (CBT) Support” in the vmPRO Users Guide.]

When you combine this technology with Quantum’s DXi deduplication solutions (including the DXi V1000 that you have, or will download free from www.quantum.com/freedxi) the efficiency gets even better. When transferring a set of blocks, which we previously skipped reading from disk, vmPRO will send blank, padded place holders for the data which is efficient to generate and easy to deduplicate. When used with the NFS protocol on a Quantum DXi, the efficiency goes up even more as vmPRO will avoid sending the padded data altogether. Instead, vmPRO uses sparse writing to tell the DXi to simply skip over writing the part of the backup set. Less data moves across the network when sparse writes are used, resulting in more efficient and faster backups. Of course, the DXi will deduplicate and compress all the data sent to it, resulting in up to a 95% disk space savings when combining vmPRO and DXi into a single solution.

But the goodness doesn’t stop at resource savings. When replicating to another DXi or to Q-Cloud (www.quantum.com/qcloud) customers can use the native images that vmPRO backs up to actually boot VMs from the DXi without having vmPRO present at those locations.

We will talk more about booting a VM from the DXi in another installment.