What is Data Domain Boost and what is it used for?

EMC Data Domain Boost software, also known as DD Boost, is designed to offload part of the Data Domain deduplication process to a backup server or application client. That prevents the Data Domain disk array from having to carry the full burden of the dedupe workload. The software is designed to increase backup speed while decreasing network bandwidth needs. This is particularly advantageous when backups are being written to an off-site Data Domain system over a wide-area network, which may have significant bandwidth limitations.

Like Symantec's OpenStorage API (OST), DD Boost provides integration between the dedupe target and the backup software. However, OST does not offload processing to a backup server. DD Boost does that by extending its software library to the backup server. This enables the backup server to send only unique data segments across the network to the Data Domain disk target where it is then deduplicated against existing backup data.

Other backup vendors have taken a similar approach to distributing the deduplication process to increase performance and reduce bandwidth needs. For example, Quantum's DXi Accent software also offloads part of the data dedupe backup process to media servers. And, Hewlett-Packard (HP) does the same with its HP StoreOnce Catalyst software.

DD Boost is integrated with the following software products*:

• EMC Avamar and NetWorker
• Dell NetVault Backup and vRanger
• HP Data Protector
• Symantec NetBackup and Backup Exec
• VMware vSphere
• Veeam Backup & Replication
• IBM Data Studio
• Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio
• Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN)
• Pivotal Greenplum Database
• SAP BR Tools and SAP HANA Studio

DD Boost is supported on the following EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems: DD160, DD990, DD2200, DD2500, DD4200, DD4500 and DD7200*.

*As of November 21, 2014.